Virtual Reality-Based Scenarios for Visuo-motor Conflicts Studies: Preliminary Results

This preliminary study looks into how visual information affects motion planning in a gravitational environment. Recently, it has been shown that goal-directed tasks, e.g. simple pointing actions, are performed using a combination of a priori knowledge and closed-loop information, coming from proprioceptive-vestibular and visual feedback. In particular it has been observed that visual information is used by the central nervous system to reorganize motor planning when visuo-motor conflicts occur. The aim of our work is to investigate deeper the contribution of the visual channel in motor planning by means of virtual reality tools. Indeed, virtual reality technology is used here to modify the nature of visual input, leading to test several scenarios from minimalist and impoverished scenes to fully immersive and realistic environments. In fact we want to understand how the richness of the visual information is relevant in influencing our motor planning. We describe here our experimental setup and protocols. Moreover we present some preliminary results and we discuss the ongoing developments.