PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Ali Farshchiansadegh
AU  - Alessandra Sciutti
AU  - Assaf Pressman
AU  - Ilana Nisky
AU  - Ferdinando A. Mussa-Ivaldi
TI  - Energy Exchanges at Contact Events Guide Sensorimotor Integration Across Intermodal Delays
AID  - 10.1101/199562
DP  - 2017 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 199562
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/10/07/199562.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/10/07/199562.full
AB  - One must know the mass of an object to accurately predict how it moves under the effect of an applied force. Similarly, the brain must represent the arm’s inertia to predict the arm’s movements elicited by commands impressed upon the muscles. Here, we present evidence suggesting that the integration of sensory information leading to the representation of the arm’s inertia does not take place continuously in time but only at discrete transient events, in which kinetic energy is exchanged between the arm and the environment. We used a visuomotor delay to induce crossmodal variations in state feedback and uncovered that the difference between visual and proprioceptive velocity estimations at isolated collision events was compensated by a change in the representation of arm inertia. The compensation maintained an invariant estimate across modalities of the expected energy exchange with the environment. This invariance captures different types of dysmetria observed across individuals following prolonged exposure to a fixed intermodal temporal perturbation and provides a new interpretation for cerebellar ataxia.