Attention and Visual Dominance in Motor Learning

Three chronometric experiments, each comparing vision and kinesthesis, were conducted to study visual dominance. The time required to switch attention from vision and from kinesthesis was equal, while switching to kinesthesis was faster than switching to vision (Experiment 1). Responses to a combined visual-kinesthetic stimulus were slower than responses to a kinesthetic stimulus alone when the subject was expecting the bimodal stimulus. The visual dominance effect was shown to depend on the subject knowing the modality of the stimulus in advance (Experiment 2). When subjects were instructed to attend one modality they had equal difficulty with conflicting visual and kinesthetic information (Experiment 3). These findings suggest that visual dominance results from a bias to attend vision when that modality seems adequate for the task. Te bias to attend vision may develop to overcome a deficiency in visual alerting.

Purpose: To clarify the effects of molar tooth loss on learning and memory, hippocampal glutamate release during a passive-avoidance task was measured with a telemetric glutamate biosensor.Methods: Male Sprague-Dawley rats were used. Under general anesthesia, all the maxillary molars were extracted from the EXT group rats (n = 8); those in the CON group (control, n = 8) were anesthetized without tooth extraction. At age 7 weeks, the rats were subjected to a passive-avoidance task consisting of acquisition and retention trials. Simultaneously, hippocampal glutamate release was measured. First, during the acquisition trial, the rats were placed in a light compartment, and the duration before they entered a dark compartment was measured (reaction latency). Immediately after the rat entered the dark compartment, an electric shock was applied through a grid floor. After 24 h, the retention trial was performed, and the reaction latency was measured in the same manner. Further, a biosensor was used to measure the release of hippocampal glutamate before and after the start of each trial.Results: Regarding the reaction latency during the passive-avoidance task, no significant differences were seen between the groups in the acquisition trial. Reaction latency increased in both groups in the retention trial, but was significantly shorter in the EXT group. Furthermore, hippocampal glutamate release in the acquisition trial was significantly shorter in the EXT group, but in the retention trial, no significant difference in glutamate release was seen between the groups.Conclusion: Molar tooth loss may impede learning and memory.

We introduced haptic cues to the serial reaction time (SRT) task alongside the standard visual cues to explore the relative contributions of haptic and visual cues to motor memory and perceptual memory. Motor learning is a complex process that likely depends on the availability of haptic sensory feedback. Motor learning is also often an implicit process, wherein the learner is not even aware that learning is taking place. The SRT task was devised to study implicit learning. Reaction times (RTs) are reduced with practice even in the absence of explicit learning about a sequence embedded in a train of cues. We adopted an SRT protocol developed by Willingham in 1999 to determine whether haptic cues contribute differently than visual cues to the balance of motor and perceptual learning. Experimental results involving 32 participants showed that sequence learning occurs implicitly with haptic stimuli to much the same extent as visual stimuli. Also, it was revealed that the dependence on motor memory (as opposed to perceptual memory) was greater in the group responding to haptic cues than the group responding to visual cues. Comparing the dependence on motor versus perceptual memory, the haptic group reached marginal significance (p=.09), whereas the visual group difference was not significant (p=.23).

The purpose of this study was to compare visual with kinesthetic instruction for learning a motor skill that is not visually monitorable. Previous studies comparing visual and kinesthetic information have all used arm tasks for which the nonvisual condition was artificial. 20 subjects were randomly assigned to either a kinesthetic or a visual instruction group. The task was to draw a horizontal line with the right foot while in a quadruped position. All subjects received visual knowledge of results. While performance improved over the course of the 10 instructional sessions and trials, no difference in performance was found between the two instructional groups. A follow-up study is required to determine whether this result was based on visual dominance. Understanding the effectiveness of the different modalities for teaching gross motor skills would be valuable to physical therapists, physical educators, and psychologists.

The results of this study suggest that information derived from kinesthetic inputs alone is not normally used to generate an estimate of the location of the hand in extrapersonal space. This finding provides support for the interpretation of previous results suggesting that a representation of a visual target in extrapersonal space must be transformed into a kinesthetic reference frame before the parameters of a targeted arm movement can be computed (Soechting and Flanders, 1989b). We asked subjects to use a pointer to indicate the spatial location of their hand following an unseen passive displacement. We found that subjects had large errors in the locations that they chose and that there was a large degree of variability for repeated trials with the same hand location. The errors were a result neither of using the pointer to indicate a spatial locus nor of an inability to make use of kinesthetic information. Instead, the errors resulted from an inability of subjects to synthesize an estimate of the hand's spatial location from only kinesthetic cues. We also asked subjects to use the pointer to indicate the location of their hand following a passive displacement when they had visual information about the passive displacement. In this case, we found that subjects performed better than when they had only kinesthetic information, but not as well as when they had only visual information about target location. This finding suggests that kinesthetic information about target location affects the processing of visual information.

Combination of visual and kinesthetic information is essential to perceive bodily movements. We conducted behavioral and functional magnetic resonance imaging experiments to investigate the neuronal correlates of visuokinesthetic combination in perception of hand movement. Participants experienced illusory flexion movement of their hand elicited by tendon vibration while they viewed video-recorded flexion (congruent: CONG) or extension (incongruent: INCONG) motions of their hand. The amount of illusory experience was graded by the visual velocities only when visual information regarding hand motion was concordant with kinesthetic information (CONG). The left posterolateral cerebellum was specifically recruited under the CONG, and this left cerebellar activation was consistent for both left and right hands. The left cerebellar activity reflected the participants' intensity of illusory hand movement under the CONG, and we further showed that coupling of activity between the left cerebellum and the “right” parietal cortex emerges during this visuokinesthetic combination/perception. The “left” cerebellum, working with the anatomically connected high-order bodily region of the “right” parietal cortex, participates in online combination of exteroceptive (vision) and interoceptive (kinesthesia) information to perceive hand movement. The cerebro–cerebellar interaction may underlie updating of one's “body image,” when perceiving bodily movement from visual and kinesthetic information.

The simultaneous presentation of a visual and an auditory stimulus can lead to a decrease in people's ability to perceive or respond to the auditory stimulus. In this study, we investigate the effect that threat has upon this phenomenon, known as the Colavita visual dominance effect. Participants performed two blocks of trials containing 40% visual, 40% auditory, and 20% bimodal trials. The first block of trials was identical for all participants, while in the second block, either the visual stimulus (visual threat condition), auditory stimulus (auditory threat condition), or neither stimulus (control condition) was fear-conditioned using aversive electrocutaneous stimuli. We predicted that, when compared with the control condition, this visual dominance effect would increase in the visual threat condition and decrease in the auditory threat condition. This hypothesis was partially supported by the data. In particular, the results showed that the fear-conditioning of the visual stimulus significantly increased the visual dominance effect relative to the control condition. However, the fear-conditioning of the auditory stimulus did not reduce the visual dominance effect but instead increased it slightly. These findings are discussed in terms of the role that attention and arousal play in the dominance of vision over audition.

Selective Engagement of Plasticity Mechanisms for Motor Memory Storage

Saccadic eye movements allow humans to explore the visual environment, quickly moving the fovea and attention to points of interest for detailed visual processing. Despite these rapid changes in visual input, the brain maintains a stable visual representation through saccadic suppression of blurred input and predictive remapping of receptive fields. In the laboratory, visually-guided saccades are driven primarily by the onset of new stimuli, while volitional saccades are driven by instructions or internal motivation. The distinction between these two classes of saccades is not definitive, but used to illustrate different cognitive loads that fall upon a spectrum based on the balance of visual input and cognitive control processes required to perform simple behavioral tasks. Visually-guided prosaccades depend upon a simple stimulus-response mapping whereby the eye movement is directed toward the peripheral stimulus quickly and accurately. Decision-making processes nonetheless slow the latencies of these basic visual-motor responses to ensure selection of an appropriate saccade target. To dissect the time course of saccade programming, researchers can include a secondary stimulus step or distractor stimulus in the saccade paradigm that alters response characteristics based on additional cognitive processes that occur. Attentional processes, for example, have a strong influence on the way in which participants respond: A pre-trial location cue attracts attention and reduces saccade latencies at that location and increases latencies at uncued locations. If attention is re-directed to central fixation, however, latencies to the originally cued location will be slower than other parts of the visual field, an effect known as inhibition of return. Furthermore, attentional preparation may contribute to the production of fast latency “express” saccades that occur in gap paradigms. The offset of fixation warns the participant of the upcoming stimulus appearance and disengages fixation neurons, allowing saccade-related activity to increase in expectation of the peripheral stimulus. On the other end of the spectrum, “volitional” forms of saccades are elicited via instructional manipulations that require participants to suppress an immediate saccade to a visual stimulus or otherwise rely upon endogenous goals to produce a saccade at a certain time. Antisaccades, ocular motor delayed response saccades, and predictive saccades all fall into this category. Antisaccade tasks require a saccade to the mirror image location of a visual stimulus, depending upon suppression of the visually-driven saccade tendency and a sensorimotor transformation of spatial coordinates to generate the volitional saccade successfully. In this task, the internal saccade programs representing the antisaccade and visually-guided saccade responses are modelled as competing activations racing toward a threshold for motor generation. An ocular motor delayed response task includes a delay period between the presentation of the peripheral stimulus and the time when participants are instructed to respond. Spatial memory processes thus are needed to maintain the target location after the visual stimulus itself is extinguished. Typically, both tasks result in slower latencies, more errors, and poorer spatial accuracy than their visually-guided counterparts. Finally, a predictive saccade task consists of a visual stimulus alternating between two locations at regular intervals. After a few trials, participants learn the spatiotemporal pattern and begin to anticipate the movement, generating saccades to the target location based on internal timing mechanisms before the visual stimulus appears. The aforementioned saccade tasks are supported by a well characterized and widespread neural saccade circuitry. This circuitry includes occipital cortex, posterior parietal cortex, frontal and supplementary eye fields, thalamus, basal ganglia, cerebellum, and the superior colliculus. Visual input initiates neural activation in occipital cortex which spreads to parietal and frontal regions for attentional processing, visuospatial calculations, and saccade motor preparation. Volitional saccade tasks show greater strength and/or extent of activation in this circuitry, and recruitment of new regions, including prefrontal cortex and anterior cingulate cortex, to support additional cognitive control requirements, such as inhibition, working memory, and motor learning. Along with input from the cerebellum, thalamus, and basal ganglia, cortical signals ultimately are integrated within the retinotopic maps of the superior colliculus where a single target location is selected and a motor program triggered via the brainstem ocular motor nuclei. Numerous neuroimaging studies in healthy humans using fMRI, EEG, MEG, and PET report activations in these brain areas during saccades and support findings from lesion studies and intracranial recordings in non-human primates. This consistency makes the saccade network a valuable model for studying cognitive control and understanding how the visual system integrates sensory input with internal goals to create a stable visual representation that guides efficient ocular motor behavior.

Although it has been documented that musical training enhances multisensory integration, there is not yet a consensus as to how musical training influences the visual dominance effect in sensory dominance. The present study adopted the Colavita visual dominance paradigm, presenting auditory stimuli concurrent with visual stimuli, to investigate the visual dominance effect between music majors and nonmusic majors and compared the reaction time and response proportion of the two kinds of participants in the bimodal trials. The results showed that the proportion of simultaneous responses in bimodal trials of music majors is higher than that of nonmusic majors; the nonmusic majors show a greater difference between the proportion of “Visual-Auditory” trials and “Auditory-Visual” trials compared with the music majors; the ΔRT of the two responses of the nonsimultaneous bimodal trials of nonmusic majors is longer than that of music majors. The results indicated that musically trained individuals have an enhanced ability to bind visual and auditory information and show a lesser Colavita effect, that is, a reduced visual dominance effect, than their nonmusic major peers. We conclude that musical training extends beyond the field of vision or auditory domain, improves audiovisual integration, and reduces the visual dominance effect.

This study examined two different videotaped instructional models on subsequent motor and verbal behaviors of adults (N=9) learning how to lift properly. The correct model group viewed a narrated videotape of a skilled individual demonstrating lifting; the learning model group viewed a videotape of an unskilled individual being taught lifting by an instructor, and the controls received no intervention. Adults lifted from floor to waist a plastic crate during 15 acquisition and 3 retention trials and lowered the crate from waist to floor during 3 transfer trials. Learning and correct model motor performances were similar yet higher than those of controls during acquisition and transfer trials. Verbal reports indicated learning, and correct models generated more extensive and associated mechanical concepts than controls yet rarely monitored such concepts during performance. A single presentation of videotapes of proper lifting using either correct or learning models is effective in enhancing motor performance and proper lifting knowledge.

Bandler and Grinder (1975) proposed the construct "most highly valued representational systems" to describe auditory, visual, and kinesthetic perceptual orientations among individuals. They set forth a predicate method for determining an individual's primary representational system. Contrary to Bandler and Grinder's construct, experimental evidence consistently supports the principle of visual dominance among humans. In order to test the effectiveness of Bandler and Grinder's constructs, 221 volunteers were screened by an alternate predicate method. 22 subjects were selected as "highly auditory" and 19 subjects were selected as "highly visual." These 41 subjects were asked to give their first impressions to 75 simultaneous, audio-visual presentations of letters, numbers, and words. Twenty-five of the simultaneous presentations were discrepant. Subjects were then individually interviewed. Their verbal responses to standardized questions were tape recorded. Four questions were examined. (1) Do the verbs, adverbs, and adjectives expressed by subjects in their taped interviews yield discrete classifications of primary representational systems by Bandler and Grinder's predicate method? (2) Do the predicate-method classifications correlate with the screening classifications derived by the alternate predicate method? (3) Do predicate-method classifications indicate whether individuals will make auditory or visual responses to the twenty-five discrepant presentations of auditory and visual stimuli? (4) Will subjects classified as auditory or visual respectively resort to auditory or visual responses with greater frequency as task and stimulus difficulty are increased over the five series of discrepant stimulus presentations? Predicate tabulations indicated that the majority of individuals could not be effectively classified by Bandler and Grinder's predicate method. A point biserial correlation was performed using the auditory and visual screening classifications and the proportion of auditory predicates expressed during the experimental interviews. No relationship was found between the two methods of classification. Attentional responses were analyzed by a 2 x 5 repeated measures ANOVA. No significant relationships were found between predicate-method classifications and responses to the discrepant stimulus presentations. Though a significant interaction resulted, the pattern of the means across the five tasks was not the pattern predicted. There was no significant relationship between predicate-method classifications and attentional responses across increasingly difficult tasks. The major finding of the study was a visual dominance effect. Thirty-six of the thirty-seven subjects responded more frequently to the visual stimuli than to the auditory stimuli on discrepant presentations. 92% of the possible 925 responses were visual, supporting the generalizability of the visual dominance principle to an experimental paradigm in which televised linguistic

Visual--auditory (VA) and visual--proprioceptive (VP) localization conflict paradigms were varied to explore the comparability of the conflict situations. In experiment 1 various attempts were made to decrease the dominance of visual information over proprioceptive and auditory target information. Pairing auditory with proprioceptive information against conflicting visual information did not lessen the visual dominance, nor did dimming the visual field. A 'cognitive' manipulation, in which the subject was led to doubt the reliability of the visual information, reduced visual dominance over audition but not visual dominance over proprioception. This difference between the two conflict situations was further explored and corroborated in experiment 2. In experiment 3 no attempt was made to lead the subject to believe that paired discrepant targets were related, and the visual dominance of audition was strong while the visual dominance of proprioception did not occur. The apparent differences between the VA and VP conflict situations are discussed with regard to the feability of generating a unitary explanation of localization conflict results. Several further factors are discussed that must be explored before undertaking such a unitary formulation.

The effects of augmented sensory feedback precision on the acquisition and retention of a simulated chiropractic task

Motor learning following unilateral stroke