Eyes and hand are both reliable at localizing somatosensory targets.

Abstract

Body representations (BR) for action are critical to perform accurate movements. Yet, behavioral measures suggest that BR are distorted even in healthy people. However, the upper limb has mostly been used as a probe so far, making difficult to decide whether BR are truly distorted or whether this depends on the effector used as a readout. Here, we aimed to assess in healthy humans the accuracy of the eye and hand effectors in localizing somatosensory targets, to determine whether they may probe BR similarly. Twenty-six participants completed two localization tasks in which they had to localize an unseen target (proprioceptive or tactile) with either their eyes or hand. Linear mixed model revealed in both tasks a larger horizontal (but not vertical) localization error for the ocular than for the manual localization performance. However, despite better hand mean accuracy, manual and ocular localization performance positively correlated to each other in both tasks. Moreover, target position also affected localization performance for both eye and hand responses: accuracy was higher for the more flexed position of the elbow in the proprioceptive task and for the thumb than for the index finger in the tactile task, thus confirming previous results of better performance for the thumb. These findings indicate that the hand seems to beat the eyes along the horizontal axis when localizing somatosensory targets, but the localization patterns revealed by the two effectors seemed to be related and characterized by the same target effect, opening the way to assess BR with the eyes when upper limb motor control is disturbed.