Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Visuomotor adaptation plays an important role in motor plan-ning and execution. However, it remains unclear how senso-rimotor transformations are recalibrated when visual and pro-prioceptive feedback are decoupled. To address this question,the present study asked participants to reach toward targets ina virtual reality (VR) environment. They were given visualfeedback of their arm movements in VR that was either con-sistent (normal motion) with the virtual world or reflected (re-versed motion) with respect to the left-right and vertical axes.Participants completed two normal motion experimental ses-sions, with a reversed motion session in between. While re-action time in the reversed motion session was longer than inthe normal motion session, participants showed the learningimprovement by completing trials in the second normal mo-tion session faster than in the first. The reduction in reactiontime was found to correlate with greater use of linear reach-ing trajectory strategies (measured using dynamic time warp-ing) in the reversed and second normal motion sessions. Thisresult appears consistent with linear motor movement plan-ning guided by increased attention to visual feedback. Suchstrategical bias persisted into the second normal motion ses-sion. Participants in the reversed session were grouped intotwo clusters depending on their preference for proximal/distaland awkward/smooth motor movements. We found that partic-ipants who preferred distal-smooth movements produced morelinear trajectories than those who preferred proximal-awkwardmovements.