Separating Predicted and Perceived Sensory Consequences of Motor Learning

During motor adaptation the discrepancy between predicted and actually perceived sensory feedback is thought to be minimized, but it can be difficult to measure predictions of the sensory consequences of actions. Studies attempting to do so have found that self-directed, unseen hand position is mislocalized in the direction of altered visual feedback. However, our lab has shown that motor adaptation also leads to changes in perceptual estimates of hand position, even when the target hand is passively displaced. We attribute these changes to a recalibration of hand proprioception, since in the absence of a volitional movement, efferent or predictive signals are likely not involved. The goal here is to quantify the extent to which changes in hand localization reflect a change in the predicted sensory (visual) consequences or a change in the perceived (proprioceptive) consequences. We did this by comparing changes in localization produced when the hand movement was self-generated (‘active localization’) versus robot-generated (‘passive localization’) to the same locations following visuomotor adaptation to a rotated cursor. In this passive version, there should be no predicted consequences of these robot-generated hand movements. We found that although changes in localization were somewhat larger in active localization, the passive localization task also elicited substantial changes. Our results suggest that the change in hand localization following visuomotor adaptation may not be based entirely on updating predicted sensory consequences, but may largely reflect changes in our proprioceptive state estimate.