Modèle attentionnel à deux étapes de la planification des mouvements de portée du bras et des saccades
Planning saccades or reach movements to a specific location in the environment relies on attentional mechanisms to select a relevant location and on motor systems to correctly guide the movements to their destination. However, the interaction between attention and action are still far from being completely understood. We wished to determine whether planning of eye and arm movements is based on shared or independent representations. In our first article, we investigated how exogenous attentional modulation through the use of behaviorally irrelevant cues influenced the temporal and spatial characteristics of the eye and the arm during single or combined movements. We found both similar and differential effects of eye and arm reaction times, which we suggest is based on two stages of motor planning; one effector-independent and one effector-dependent. In our second article, we investigated the influence of exogenous cueing on arm movements during visuomotor adaptation to identify whether attentional mechanisms facilitate motor planning or visual target detection. Our findings demonstrated that motor planning during a visuomotor adaptation task relied more on the visual target than on arm motor planning, contrastingly to saccades, as has been shown in a previous study. Taken together, our papers provide better understanding of the operating mechanisms of attention on eye and arm movements and the interaction between sensory and motor systems. We propose a dual-stage attentional model to bring together a number of divergent findings in the field with respect to eye and arm planning processes.
Saccades Visual attention Exogenous attention Visually-guided movements Coordinated movements Reach movements Hand-eye coordination Visuomotor adaptation Reaction times Cueing