Biomedical subjects

D Y Henriques

Publications and source records attributed to D Y Henriques.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2000

Task-dependent constraints in motor control: pinhole goggles make the head move like an eye.

In the 19th century, Donders observed that only one three-dimensional eye orientation is used for each gaze direction. Listing's law further specifies that the full set of eye orientation vectors forms a plane, whereas the equivalent Donders' law for the head, the Fick strategy, specifies a twisted two-dimensional range. Surprisingly, despite considerable research and speculation, the biological reasons for choosing one such range over another remain obscure. In the current study, human subjects performed head-free gaze shifts between visual targets while wearing pinhole goggles. During fixations, the head orientation range still obeyed Donders' law, but in most subjects, it immediately changed from the twisted Fick-like range to a flattened Listing-like range. Further controls showed that this was not attributable to loss of binocular vision or increased range of head motion, nor was it attributable to blocked peripheral vision; when subjects pointed a helmet-mounted laser toward targets (a task with goggle-like motor demands but normal vision), the head followed Listing's law even more closely. Donders' law of the head only broke down (in favor of a "minimum-rotation strategy") when head motion was dissociated from gaze. These behaviors could not be modeled using current "Donders' operators" but were readily simulated nonholonomically, i.e., by modulating head velocity commands as a function of position and task. We conclude that the gaze control system uses such velocity rules to shape Donders' law on a moment-to-moment basis, not primarily to satisfy perceptual or anatomic demands, but rather for motor optimization; the Fick strategy optimizes the role of the head as a platform for eye movement, whereas Listing's law optimizes rapid control of the eye (or head) as a gaze pointer.

Adult↗

PubMed2000

Curvature of visual space under vertical eye rotation: implications for spatial vision and visuomotor control.

Most models of spatial vision and visuomotor control reconstruct visual space by adding a vector representing the site of retinal stimulation to another vector representing gaze angle. However, this scheme fails to account for the curvatures in retinal projection produced by rotatory displacements in eye orientation. In particular, our simulations demonstrate that even simple vertical eye rotation changes the curvature of horizontal retinal projections with respect to eye-fixed retinal landmarks. We confirmed the existence of such curvatures by measuring target direction in eye coordinates in which the retinotopic representation of horizontally displaced targets curved obliquely as a function of vertical eye orientation. We then asked subjects to point (open loop) toward briefly flashed targets at various points along these lines of curvature. The vector-addition model predicted errors in pointing trajectory as a function of eye orientation. In contrast, with only minor exceptions, actual subjects showed no such errors, showing a complete neural compensation for the eye position-dependent geometry of retinal curvatures. Rather than bolstering the traditional model with additional corrective mechanisms for these nonlinear effects, we suggest that the complete geometry of retinal projection can be decoded through a single multiplicative comparison with three-dimensional eye orientation. Moreover, because the visuomotor transformation for pointing involves specific parietal and frontal cortical processes, our experiment implicates specific regions of cortex in such nonlinear transformations.

Adult↗

PubMed2000

Direction-dependent distortions of retinocentric space in the visuomotor transformation for pointing.

The aim of this study was to: (1) quantify errors in open-loop pointing toward a spatially central (but retinally peripheral) visual target with gaze maintained in various eccentric horizontal, vertical, and oblique directions; and (2) determine the computational source of these errors. Eye and arm orientations were measured with the use of search coils while six head-fixed subjects looked and pointed toward remembered targets in complete darkness. On average, subjects made small exaggerations in both the vertical and horizontal components of retinal displacement (tending to overshoot the target relative to current gaze), but individual subjects showed considerable variations in this pattern. Moreover, pointing errors for oblique retinal targets were only partially predictable from errors for the cardinal directions, suggesting that most of these errors did not arise within independent vertical and horizontal coordinate channels. The remaining variance was related to nonhomogeneous, direction-dependent distortions in reading out the magnitudes and directions of retinal displacement. The largest and most consistent nonhomogeneities occurred as discontinuities between adjacent points across the vertical meridian of retinotopic space, perhaps related to the break between the representations of space in the left and right cortices. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that at least some of these visuomotor distortions are due to miscalibrations in quasi-independent visuomotor readout mechanisms for "patches" of retinotopic space, with major discontinuities existing between patches at certain anatomic and/or physiological borders.

Adult↗

PubMed2000

Kinematic strategies for upper arm-forearm coordination in three dimensions.

This study addressed the question of how the three-dimensional (3-D) control strategy for the upper arm depends on what the forearm is doing. Subjects were instructed to point a laser-attached in line with the upper arm-toward various visual targets, such that two-dimensional (2-D) pointing directions of the upper arm were held constant across different tasks. For each such task, subjects maintained one of several static upper arm-forearm configurations, i. e., each with a set elbow angle and forearm orientation. Upper arm, forearm, and eye orientations were measured with the use of 3-D search coils. The results confirmed that Donders' law (a behavioral restriction of 3-D orientation vectors to a 2-D "surface") does not hold across all pointing tasks, i.e., for a given pointing target, upper arm torsion varied widely. However, for any one static elbow configuration, torsional variance was considerably reduced and was independent of previous arm position, resulting in a thin, Donders-like surface of orientation vectors. More importantly, the shape of this surface (which describes upper arm torsion as a function of its 2-D pointing direction) depended on both elbow angle and forearm orientation. For pointing with the arm fully extended or with the elbow flexed in the horizontal plane, a Listing's-law-like strategy was observed, minimizing shoulder rotations to and from center at the cost of position-dependent tilts in the forearm. In contrast, when the arm was bent in the vertical plane, the surface of best fit showed a Fick-like twist that increased continuously as a function of static elbow flexion, thereby reducing position-dependent tilts of the forearm with respect to gravity. In each case, the torsional variance from these surfaces remained constant, suggesting that Donders' law was obeyed equally well for each task condition. Further experiments established that these kinematic rules were independent of gaze direction and eye orientation, suggesting that Donders' law of the arm does not coordinate with Listing's law for the eye. These results revive the idea that Donders' law is an important governing principle for the control of arm movements but also suggest that its various forms may only be limited manifestations of a more general set of context-dependent kinematic rules. We propose that these rules are implemented by neural velocity commands arising as a function of initial arm orientation and desired pointing direction, calculated such that the torsional orientation of the upper arm is implicitly coordinated with desired forearm posture.

Biomechanical Phenomena↗

PubMed1998

Gaze-centered remapping of remembered visual space in an open-loop pointing task.

Establishing a coherent internal reference frame for visuospatial representation and maintaining the integrity of this frame during eye movements are thought to be crucial for both perception and motor control. A stable headcentric representation could be constructed by internally comparing retinal signals with eye position. Alternatively, visual memory traces could be actively remapped within an oculocentric frame to compensate for each eye movement. We tested these models by measuring errors in manual pointing (in complete darkness) toward briefly flashed central targets during three oculomotor paradigms; subjects pointed accurately when gaze was maintained on the target location (control paradigm). However, when steadily fixating peripheral locations (static paradigm), subjects exaggerated the retinal eccentricity of the central target by 13.4 +/- 5.1%. In the key "dynamic" paradigm, subjects briefly foveated the central target and then saccaded peripherally before pointing toward the remembered location of the target. Our headcentric model predicted accurate pointing (as seen in the control paradigm) independent of the saccade, whereas our oculocentric model predicted misestimation (as seen in the static paradigm) of an internally shifted retinotopic trace. In fact, pointing errors were significantly larger than were control errors (p </= 0.003) and were indistinguishable (p >/= 0.25) from the static paradigm errors. Scatter plots of pointing errors (dynamic vs static paradigm) for various final fixation directions showed an overall slope of 0.97, contradicting the headcentric prediction (0. 0) and supporting the oculocentric prediction (1.0). Varying both fixation and pointing-target direction confirmed that these errors were a function of retinotopically shifted memory traces rather than eye position per se. To reconcile these results with previous pointing experiments, we propose a "conversion-on-demand" model of visuomotor control in which multiple visual targets are stored and rotated (noncommutatively) within the oculocentric frame, whereas only select targets are transformed further into head- or bodycentric frames for motor execution.

Adult↗