Dissociable effects of urgency and evidence accumulation during reaching revealed by dynamic multisensory integration

Abstract

When making perceptual decisions, humans combine information across sensory modalities dependent on their respective uncertainties. However, it remains unknown how the brain integrates multisensory feedback during movement, and which factors besides sensory uncertainty influence sensory contributions. We performed two reaching experiments on healthy adults to investigate whether movement corrections to combined visual and mechanical perturbations scale with visual uncertainty. To describe the dynamics of multimodal feedback responses, we further varied movement time and visual feedback duration during the movement. The results of our first experiment show that the contribution of visual feedback decreased with uncertainty. Additionally, we observed a transient phase during which visual feedback responses were stronger during faster movements. In a follow-up experiment, we found that the contribution of vision increased more quickly during slow movements when we presented the visual feedback for a longer time. Muscle activity corresponding to these visual responses exhibited modulations with sensory uncertainty and movement speed ca. 100ms following the onset of the visual feedback. Using an optimal feedback control model, we show that the increased response to visual feedback during fast movements can be explained by an urgency-dependent increase in control gains. Further, the fact that a longer viewing duration increased the visual contributions suggests that the brain accumulates sensory information over time to estimate the state of the arm during reaching. Our results provide additional evidence concerning the link between reaching control and decision-making, both of which appear to be influenced by sensory evidence accumulation and response urgency.Significance statement The time-course of multisensory integration during movement, along with the factors influencing this process, still requires further investigation. Here, we tested how visual uncertainty, movement speed, and visual feedback duration influence reach corrections to combined visual and mechanical perturbations. Using an optimal feedback control model, we illustrate that the time-course of multimodal corrections follows the predictions of a Kalman filter which continuously weighs sensory feedback and internal predictions according to their reliability. Importantly, we further show that changes in movement speed led to urgency-dependent modulations of control gains. Our results corroborate previous research linking motor control and decision-making by highlighting that multisensory feedback responses depend on sensory evidence accumulation and response urgency in a similar way as decision-making processes.