ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Hum. Neurosci.
Sec. Motor Neuroscience
Visuomotor Adaptation Enhances Representational Acuity Without Altering Spatial Bias
Provisionally accepted
- Université Bourgogne Europe, INSERM, CAPS UMR 1093, Dijon, France
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Prism adaptation is a widely used paradigm to investigate sensorimotor plasticity. Notably, its effects extend beyond motor behavior to influence spatial cognition. In this study, we examined whether visuomotor rotation—a task that mimics the visuomotor discrepancy induced by prism exposure—similarly impacts spatial representation. Participants adapted to either leftward or rightward 15-deg rotations, introduced either abruptly (within a single trial) or gradually (over 34 trials). Our first key finding is that none of these conditions produced cognitive after-effects in a perceptual line bisection task. This absence of transfer has important methodological implications: visuomotor rotation appears to be a suitable tool to probe sensorimotor plasticity without altering spatial representation, making it particularly valuable for studying populations with atypical cognitive spatial biases that should not be further disturbed. A second, novel finding was the enhancement of participants' sensitivity in judging the midpoint of a line—a phenomenon we refer to as representational acuity. This acuity improved overall and was enhanced following gradual perturbation and persisted beyond the adaptation phase. Together, these results highlight a dissociation between the cognitive and perceptual consequences of visuomotor adaptation and contribute to our understanding of how sensorimotor learning processes relate to spatial cognition.
Keywords: visuomotor rotation, space representation, line bisection, Representational acuity, explicit andimplicit learning
Received: 15 Jul 2025; Accepted: 05 Nov 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 MICHEL, Amoura and White. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Carine MICHEL, carine.michel@u-bourgogne.fr
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