Motor State Coding

Background

One of the challenges in understanding cortical control of movement is to understand the basis that it uses for computing and updating motor commands. This example is designed to illustrate the center-out cursor task in which a cursor moves to one of the eight radial targets.

See also: Visuomotor Rotation Task (VMR)

Instructions

Move the circle to the starting position (orange). Hover the cursor slightly until the start circle no longer lights up. Now, move it to the target (green). There will be 5 baseline trials followed by 5 perturbed trials followed by 5 washout trials.

• Click the button with Jitter or Homing to toggle the game mode.
• Click Start to begin the game.
• The mouse moves the cursor.

Questions

• How does the same VMR impact movements depending on the mode of the controller?
• Are there different strategies that are better equipped at handling the perturbation?
• Are there ways to remove strategies that prevent you from testing a hypothesis?