A behavior study of the effects of visual feedback on motor output

Visual feedback is a crucial factor that impacts the motor function, and a number of parameters, such as gain, delay and frequency, all play a role in regulating the motor output. In this paper, we conduct a behavioral study on 12 volunteers to determine the effects of visual feedback in the physical movement by measuring the grasp force output under different visual feedback gain levels. To this end, two force tracking tasks with different incremental/decremental rates of the force have been designed, and the force deviation and the error rate from the 12 participants are recorded when they are exposed to different visual gains. Further statistical analysis on the experimental data reveals that the gain of visual stimuli has a significant influence on the force output. For the same force tracking task, visual feedback with high gain tends to enhance the regulation of force production. The results also suggest that different visual feedback gains may be mapped onto different cortex function areas governing different motor tasks. © 2006 IEEE