Short-Term Modulation of Online Monocular Visuomotor Function

Abstract

Previous literature suggests that correcting ongoing movements is more effective when using the dominant limb and seeing with the dominant eye. Specifically, individuals are more effective at adjusting their movement to account for an imperceptibly perturbed or changed target location (i.e., online movement correction), when vision is available to the dominant eye. However, less is known if visual-motor functions based on monocular information can undergo short-term neuroplastic changes after a bout of practice, to improve online correction processes. Participants (n = 12) performed pointing movements monocularly and their ability to correct their movement towards an imperceptibly displaced target was assessed. On the first day, the eye associated with smaller correction amplitudes was exclusively trained during acquisition. While correction amplitude was assessed again with both eyes monocularly, only the eye with smaller correction amplitudes in the pre-test showed significant improvement in delayed retention. These results indicate that monocular visuomotor pathways can undergo short-term neuroplastic changes.

Keywords:

• visual asymmetry
• motor control
• limb trajectory corrections
• neural plasticity
• manual aiming

Disclosure Statement

The authors report there are no competing interests to declare.

Notes

1 To address whether the jump trial distribution across the experimental phases influenced performance, the percentage of jump trials was submitted to a 3 Experimental Phase (pre-test, immediate retention, and delayed retention) x 4 Jump Trial Pairing (single/non-consecutive, pair, triplet, quadruplet) repeated-measures ANOVA. From these analyses, only the main effect of Jump Trial Pairing yielded significance (p < 0.01), suggesting that percentage of single/non-consecutive jump trials were greater than all other pairing, and that the percentage of paired jump trials was greater than triplets and quadruplets. Thus, it is unlikely that any changes in jump trial distribution influenced performance or learning.

Additional information

Funding

Support for this research was provided by grants from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), the Canadian Foundation for Innovation (CFI), and the Ontario Research Fund (ORF; all granted to L. Tremblay), an Ontario Graduate Scholarship (granted to D.M. Manzone), and the University of Toronto.