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Abstract

The human capacity to adjust perceptually and behaviourally to spatial perturbations (eg, prism goggles) has fascinated researchers for a long time. To study whether such perceptual adaptation through sensorimotor skill learning also occurs in the temporal domain, we trained 10 participants on a visuomotor control task with feedback delays. Before and after adaptation, simultaneity perception was tested in a separate visuomotor temporal order judgments task (subject motion before or after visual stimulus?). Participants steered a moving dot through a maze with a stylus/graphics tablet for ca. 30 minutes with a 200 ms visual feedback delay. Over training, the point of subjective simultaneity (PSS) shifted 45±7 ms towards perceiving the visual stimulus first. No PSS shift occurred in the no delay control group (two-sample t-test: p<0.001). A negative aftereffect in task performance (drop from 0.86 to 0.32) was found in the experimental but not in the control group (sign test: p=0.002), whose magnitude tends to correlate with the PSS shift. We conclude that adaptation to feedback delays in a specific visuomotor control task leads to more general recalibration of perceived visuomotor simultaneity, a result with potential relevance for human computer interaction in the presence of transmission delays.