Role of Eye and Hand Initial Position in the Directional Coding of Reaching

Abstract

To investigate the nature of the frames of reference used to control an arm movement aimed at a visual target, we studied the accuracy of movements differing by the initial arm and eye positions. The results support the assumption that in darkness target location is internally represented in an egocentric frame of reference. Furthermore, when movements carried out with and without eye saccade are compared, it appears that foveating the target changes the reference used to generate the reaching arm movements, that is, the oculocentric reference is replaced by a head–trunk reference. An explanation for this phenomenon could be that a steady body-related landmark is needed to insure stable registering of the target location in the surrounding space, despite displacement of the body segments with respect to one another.

Key Words:

• eye movements
• frames of reference
• goal-directed arm movements