Influence of stimulus velocity profile on unintentional visuomotor entrainment depends on eye movements

Humans spontaneously entrain their movements to visual rhythms in the environment. Previous research has shown that the strength of such unintentional visuomotor entrainment is enhanced when observing rhythms characterized by the nonlinear, Rayleigh kinematics typical of human movements; such moveme...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Experimental brain research 2017-11, Vol.235 (11), p.3279-3286
Main Authors: Varlet, Manuel, Schmidt, R. C., Richardson, Michael J.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Biomedical and Life Sciences
Biomedicine
Entrainment
Eye
Eye movements
Kinematics
Neural circuitry
Neurology
Neurosciences
Observations
Perceptual-motor processes
Physiological aspects
Psychological aspects
Reaction time (Psychology)
Research Article
Rhythms
Sensorimotor integration
Visual stimuli
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Summary:Humans spontaneously entrain their movements to visual rhythms in the environment. Previous research has shown that the strength of such unintentional visuomotor entrainment is enhanced when observing rhythms characterized by the nonlinear, Rayleigh kinematics typical of human movements; such movements are characterized by greater slowness towards the trajectory turning points compared to sinusoidal movements. However, the enhanced unintentional entrainment to rhythms exhibiting Rayleigh kinematics has only been shown to occur when participants tracked stimulus movements with their eyes, which might have facilitated access to important information for enhanced entrainment. The current study compared the strength of unintentional visuomotor entrainment with both Rayleigh and sinusoidal kinematics when participants were either tracking (eye following the oscillating stimulus) or non-tracking (eye fixed at the centre of the stimulus trajectory) stimulus movements. The results showed that enhanced unintentional entrainment with Rayleigh stimuli only occurred with eye-tracking, supporting that slowness of rhythmic movements towards turning points facilitate entrainment and that access to this information depends on eye movements.
ISSN:0014-4819
1432-1106
DOI:10.1007/s00221-017-5055-8