Visual feedback of hand and target location does not explain the tendency for straight adapted reaches

Subjects in laboratory settings exhibit straight hand paths—typified by the minimum jerk path—even in the presence of a learned but disturbing force field. At the same time it is known that in this setting, visual feedback strongly influences reaches, biasing them to be straight. Here we examine whether or not this bias can account for the straightness of movements made in a force field. We ran three curl field experiments to investigate how the lack of visual feedback influences adapted reaches. In a first experiment, hand position was displayed at the beginning and at the end of each trial, but extinguished during movement, and the hand was passively brought back to the home location. In the second experiment, visual feedback of neither the hand nor the target was provided, and targets were haptically rendered as “dimples.” In order to provide extended practice, a third experiment was run with a single target and an active reach back to the home location. In all three cases we found minor changes in the adapted reaches relative to control groups that had full visual feedback. Our subjects adopted trajectories that were better explained by minimum jerk paths over those that minimize effort. The results indicate that for point-to-point reaching movements the visual feedback, or lack there of, cannot explain why reaches appear to be straight, even after adapting to a perturbing force field.