Flexible weighting of body-related effects in action production

Abstract

A previous study on ideomotor action control showed that predictable action effects in the agent’s environment influenced how an action is carried out. If participants were required to perform a forceful keypress, they exerted more force when these actions would produce a quiet compared to a loud tone, and this observation suggests that anticipated proprioceptive and auditory action effects are integrated with each other during action planning and control. In light of the typically weak influence of body-related effect found in recent work, we aimed to extend this pattern of results to the intra-modal case of integrating proprioceptive/tactile feedback of a movement and following vibro-tactile effects. Our results suggest that the same weighted integration process as for the cross-modal case applies to the intra-modal case. These observations support the idea of a common mechanism which binds all action-related features in an integrated action representation, irrespective of whether these features relate to exafferent or reafferent signals.

From Affordances to Abstract Words: The Flexibility of Sensorimotor Grounding

“…Indeed, tactile and kinesthetic consequences are integrated with action codes to select the effector and the force needed to perform an action (e.g., [49][50][51]), movement trajectories [52][53][54], and to refine the generative model used in active inferences [55]. Therefore, potential nociceptive tactile consequences derived from object dangerousness (e.g., [30,31]) in addition to the state of the body can be considered in the selection of action codes.…”

Embodiment of approach-avoidance behavior: Motivational priming of whole-body movements in a virtual world.

“…This cluster of proprioception could be differentiated from signals from other senses, such as the visual perception of the (virtual) world. Assuming flexibility in the weighting of sensory signals (for evidence see, e.g., Thébault, Pfister, Michalland, & Brouillet, 2020), proprioception of the whole-body movement (f1) could have been weighted stronger than visual perceptions (f2) in Study 1 and Study 2, because this weighting reduced the complexity of the task (for a justification of this assumption see our introduction to Study 3). Consequently, discrepancies to f1 were monitored more closely than discrepancies to f2 in this set of studies, minimizing the This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.…”

The emergence of action-effect-related motor adaptation amidst outcome unpredictability.

“…Most of our interactions with everyday objects and devices produce external, environment-related sensory effects (and they always produce proprioceptive or tactile changes as well—a fact often neglected in studies related to action control; Pfister, 2019; see also Thébault et al, 2020; Wirth et al, 2016). These distal effects can be irrelevant side-effects (e.g., click of the lightswitch) or the goals of the actions themselves (e.g., illumination of the room, Greenwald, 1970; Hommel et al, 2001).…”

“…The separation of the conditions may give rise to several contributions to the observed motor differences between actions with and without auditory effects; thus, eliminating this separation could also affect action-related motor adaptation. First, since confining tone-eliciting actions to a separate condition makes auditory effects highly predictable, action effect anticipation may also influence action planning and control as described, for example, in the sensorimotor synchronization-related literature (Aschersleben, 2002; Aschersleben & Prinz, 1997; Thébault et al, 2020) Specifically, the anticipation of tactile/proprioceptive (Thébault et al, 2020) and auditory effects (Kunde et al, 2004) can modulate the force exertion pattern of the planned action: Whereas the expectation of a loud tone effect can lead to lower exerted force, the expectation of a quiet tone tends to result in higher force exertion. If action-effect–related motor adaptation relies on such anticipatory mechanisms, doing away with the blocked design where auditory effects are predictable might also eliminate motor differences between tone-eliciting and silent actions.…”