NCT05374460

Factors Affecting Sensory and Motor Learning

• Status: Recruiting
• Phase: N/A
• Study type: Interventional
• Enrollment: 300 (estimated)
• Sponsor: Indiana University · Academic / Other
• Sex: All
• Age: 18 Years – 45 Years
• Healthy volunteers: Accepted

Summary

How participants perceive the position of their own hand in various contexts will be examined. This will include changing the visual display to suggest the hand is in a slightly different position, and asking participants to indicate where they think it is by pointing with their other hand.

Detailed description

Hand position can be estimated visually, from an image on the retina, and proprioceptively, from sensors in the joints, muscles, and skin. The brain is thought to weight and combine available sensory estimates to form an integrated multisensory estimate. Inherent in this process is the capacity to realign one or both sensory estimates when they become spatially mismatched, as when washing dishes with the hands immersed in water, which refracts light. It is generally assumed that if a person knows about the sensory mismatch somehow, the realignment will not occur. This assumption will be tested in two experiments by giving people this information in different ways. Expt. A: Conscious awareness of the mismatch will be presented in different ways, or absent. Expt. B: Movement error feedback will be presented in different ways, or absent.

Conditions

• Basic Science

Interventions

Type	Name	Description
BEHAVIORAL	Explanatory diagram	Participant is told there will be a mismatch between their target finger and the visual indicator of target finger position. They will be shown a diagram explaining this.
BEHAVIORAL	Direct vision	Foamboard under mirror removed, making the mirror see-through and the hand directly visible. Mismatch between target hand and visual indicator will be directly visible.
BEHAVIORAL	Movement feedback, target hand	After the participant points at each target, a cursor indicating final pointing position will be displayed briefly. The visual indicator of the target hand will be displaced.
BEHAVIORAL	Movement feedback, pointing hand	After the participant points at each target, a cursor indicating final pointing position will be displayed briefly. The visual indicator of the target hand will not change, but the cursor indicating pointing hand position will change.
BEHAVIORAL	No movement feedback	The visual indicator of the target hand will be displaced, but there will be no cursor to indicate the pointing hand's position.
BEHAVIORAL	Attend to the targets	Participants will not be told anything about the visuo-proprioceptive mismatch. Instead, they will be asked simply to attend to the target positions.

Timeline

• Start date: 2022-04-29
• Primary completion: 2027-04-30
• Completion: 2027-04-30
• First posted: 2022-05-16
• Last updated: 2025-08-26

Locations

1 site across 1 country: United States