Reference frame for reaching movements to somatsensory targets

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Katja Fiehler
• Subject Area: General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology
• Term: from 2011 to 2018
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 196036037

Goal-directed movements to targets perceived by somatosensory information, such as touch or proprioception, play an important role for everyday activities, e.g. grasping the keys in a purse or scratching an itchy body part. In order to transform the somatosensory input into a movement plan, information about target and effector (e.g. hand) needs to be represented in a common spatial reference frame. While there is converging evidence for a gaze-centered representation of visual targets, the reference frame used to represent somatosensory targets for movements is rather unclear. The goal of the present proposal is to determine the reference frame for proprioceptive targets for reaching and to further examine how the spatial representation changes due to a movement of the target effector. Three projects are proposed which aim to (a) determine the contribution of body-, hand-, and gaze-centered reference frames for proprioceptive reach targets, (b) identify the brain areas representing proprioceptive reach targets in a body- and/or gaze-centered reference frame, and (c) reveal how multiple spatial representations of visual and proprioceptive reach targets are combined and integrated into a common spatial representation. These goals shall be achieved by a multimodal approach combining behavioral experiments, functional neuroimaging and computational modelling.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants