Thanks, Pedro!

Congratulations!

(check out the paper for more results!)

There was, however, one region that *did* show different responses to delays depending on their behavioural relevance: the cerebellum. A nice support for its key role in adaptation as suggested by many others!

But, lo and behold, the usual suspects (i.e. temporoparietal and premotor cortices) responded strongly to delays—independently of behavioural relevance. Maybe visuomotor comparison is a basic process of self-other distinction that is not affected (much) by task demands!

We replicated key activations of posterior parietal, extrastriate, and cerebellar areas by visuomotor adaptation. The nice thing is: We show these activations compared with exposition to identical visual delays and movements, but in the absence of attempted adaptation.

So, we used an fMRI-VR visuomotor adaptation task with frequent changes in visual feedback delays. BUT half of the time, participants had to ignore the visual feedback (no adaptation).

Awesome, congratulations!

Yes, absolutely, good point! Several studies come to my mind here, e.g. academic.oup.com/scan/article...

Feedback and literature suggestions most welcome, thank you (for your attention to this matter!)

AND: violations of visual kinematic invariants in spatially displaced feedback can be detected during observation (as in previous work e.g. by @royesal.bsky.social); but that even here, action enhances sensitivity through visuomotor comparisons.

We show that perception overall benefits from action (i.e., visuomotor comparisons); especially for delayed feedback.

So the key difference was in whether or not visual and motor kinematics corresponded; and using the elliptical shape, we expected participants to produce systematic variations in velocity - and be sensitive when visual feedback violated those.

There's some neat bits to our design (we believe), such as that delayed and displaced feedback followed the same (elliptical) trajectory as the executed movement; and that it was matched in terms of overall spatial deviation.