The gravitational imprint on sensorimotor planning and control

Abstract

Humans excel at learning complex tasks, and elite performers such as musicians or athletes develop motor skills that defy biomechanical constraints. All actions require the movement of massive bodies. Of particular interest in the process of sensorimotor learning and control is the impact of gravitational forces on the body. Indeed, efficient control and accurate internal representations of the body configuration in space depend on our ability to feel and anticipate the action of gravity. Here we review studies on perception and sensorimotor control in both normal and altered gravity. Behavioral and modeling studies together suggested that the nervous system develops efficient strategies to take advantage of gravitational forces across a wide variety of tasks. However, when the body was exposed to altered gravity, the rate and amount of adaptation exhibited substantial variation from one experiment to another and sometimes led to partial adjustment only. Overall, these results support the hypothesis that the brain uses a multimodal and flexible representation of the effect of gravity on our body and movements. Future work is necessary to better characterize the nature of this internal representation and the extent to which it can adapt to novel contexts.