The Pointing Errors in Optic Ataxia Reveal the Role of "Peripheral Magnification" of the PPC.

Interaction with visual objects in the environment requires an accurate correspondence between visual space and its internal representation within the brain. Many clinical conditions involve some impairment in visuo-motor control and the errors created by the lesion of a specific brain region are neither random nor uninformative. Modern approaches to studying the neuropsychology of action require powerful data-driven analyses and error modeling in order to understand the function of the lesioned areas. In the present paper we carried out mixed-effect analyses of the pointing errors of seven optic ataxia patients and seven control subjects. We found that a small parameter set is sufficient to explain the pointing errors produced by unilateral optic ataxia patients. In particular, the extremely stereotypical errors made when pointing toward the contralesional visual field can be fitted by mathematical models similar to those used to model central magnification in cortical or sub-cortical structure(s). Our interpretation is that visual areas that contain this footprint of central magnification guide pointing movements when the posterior parietal cortex (PPC) is damaged and that the functional role of the PPC is to actively compensate for the under-representation of peripheral vision that accompanies central magnification. Optic ataxia misreaching reveals what would be hand movement accuracy and precision if the human motor system did not include elaborated corrective processes for reaching and grasping to non-foveated targets.

Economic decisions for others: an exception to loss aversion law.

In everyday life, people often make decisions on behalf of others. The current study investigates whether risk preferences of decision-makers differ when the reference point is no longer their own money but somebody else money. Thirty four healthy participants performed three different monetary risky choices tasks by making decisions for oneself and for another unknown person. Results showed that loss aversion bias was significantly reduced when participants were choosing on behalf of another person compared to when choosing for themselves. The influence of emotions like regret on decision-making may explain these results. We discuss the importance of the sense of responsibility embodied in the emotion of regret in modulating economic decisions for self but not for others. Moreover, our findings are consistent with the Risk-as-feelings hypothesis, suggesting that self-other asymmetrical behavior is due to the extent the decision-maker is affected by the real and emotional consequences of his/her decision.

Oxytocin's fingerprint in personality traits and regional brain volume.

Oxytocin has a fundamental role in social behavior. In humans, supporting evidence shows that oxytocin enhances people's ability to trust or affiliate with others. A key question is whether differences in plasma oxytocin concentration in humans are related to people's differences in their social traits of personality and if such differences are reflected in the structural organization of brain areas responsive to the action of this hormone. We examined the correlation between oxytocin plasma levels and personality traits in 30 healthy subjects, tested with the Inventory revised neuroticism-extroversion-openness personality inventory (NEO-PI-R). By using the voxel-based morphometry technique, we also investigated changes in gray matter volume as a function of the plasma oxytocin level and NEO-PI-R scores. A positive correlation was found between plasma oxytocin and extraversion scores, a dimension that captures social affiliative tendencies. Moreover, we found an inverse correlation between plasma oxytocin and the volume of the right amygdala and the right hippocampus, 2 brain areas implicated in fear and anxiety. Finally, we showed that the amygdala-hippocampal complex correlate negatively with extraversion scores. Our findings provide evidence for a neural mechanism linking physiological oxytocin's variability and structural variation of brain regions relevant for emotion regulation to individual differences in affiliative personality traits.

When one size does not fit all: a simple statistical method to deal with across-individual variations of effects.

In science, it is a common experience to discover that although the investigated effect is very clear in some individuals, statistical tests are not significant because the effect is null or even opposite in other individuals. Indeed, t-tests, Anovas and linear regressions compare the average effect with respect to its inter-individual variability, so that they can fail to evidence a factor that has a high effect in many individuals (with respect to the intra-individual variability). In such paradoxical situations, statistical tools are at odds with the researcher's aim to uncover any factor that affects individual behavior, and not only those with stereotypical effects. In order to go beyond the reductive and sometimes illusory description of the average behavior, we propose a simple statistical method: applying a Kolmogorov-Smirnov test to assess whether the distribution of p-values provided by individual tests is significantly biased towards zero. Using Monte-Carlo studies, we assess the power of this two-step procedure with respect to RM Anova and multilevel mixed-effect analyses, and probe its robustness when individual data violate the assumption of normality and homoscedasticity. We find that the method is powerful and robust even with small sample sizes for which multilevel methods reach their limits. In contrast to existing methods for combining p-values, the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test has unique resistance to outlier individuals: it cannot yield significance based on a high effect in one or two exceptional individuals, which allows drawing valid population inferences. The simplicity and ease of use of our method facilitates the identification of factors that would otherwise be overlooked because they affect individual behavior in significant but variable ways, and its power and reliability with small sample sizes (<30-50 individuals) suggest it as a tool of choice in exploratory studies.

Systematic retinotopic reaching error vectors in unilateral optic ataxia.

The main aim of this study is to determine the reference frame of the pointing errors that characterize patients with unilateral optic ataxia (OA). The reaching errors of seven patients with unilateral OA when pointing on a 2D matrix in peripheral vision were investigated in order to better qualify the reference frame of their deficit. Patients were asked to fixate a central target and then to point at one of 24 visual targets presented in their left or right peripheral visual fields, with their left or right hands. The four left and the three right hemisphere lesion patients with OA exhibited an identical pattern of results. In the contralesional visual field, error vectors were systematically directed toward the fixation point, rather than horizontally toward the side of the lesion. OA results from a deficit in transforming targets' eye-centred coordinates into appropriate motor commands.

Velocity control in Parkinson's disease: a quantitative analysis of isochrony in scribbling movements.

An experiment was conducted to contrast the motor performance of three groups (N = 20) of participants: (1) patients with confirmed Parkinson Disease (PD) diagnose; (2) age-matched controls; (3) young adults. The task consisted of scribbling freely for 10 s within circular frames of different sizes. Comparison among groups focused on the relation between the figural elements of the trace (overall size and trace length) and the velocity of the drawing movements. Results were analysed within the framework of previous work on normal individuals showing that instantaneous velocity of drawing movements depends jointly on trace curvature (Two-thirds Power Law) and trace extent (Isochrony principle). The motor behaviour of PD patients exhibited all classical symptoms of the disease (reduced average velocity, reduced fluency, micrographia). At a coarse level of analysis both isochrony and the dependence of velocity on curvature, which are supposed to reflect cortical mechanisms, were spared in PD patients. Instead, significant differences with respects to the control groups emerged from an in-depth analysis of the velocity control suggesting that patients did not scale average velocity as effectively as controls. We factored out velocity control by distinguishing the influence of the broad context in which movement is planned--i.e. the size of the limiting frames--from the influence of the local context--i.e. the linear extent of the unit of motor action being executed. The balance between the two factors was found to be distinctively different in PD patients and controls. This difference is discussed in the light of current theorizing on the role of cortical and sub-cortical mechanisms in the aetiology of PD. We argue that the results are congruent with the notion that cortical mechanisms are responsible for generating a parametric template of the desired movement and the BG specify the actual spatio-temporal parameters through a multiplicative gain factor acting on both size and velocity.

Error parsing in visuomotor pointing reveals independent processing of amplitude and direction.

An experiment investigated systematic pointing errors in horizontal movements performed without visual feedback toward 48 targets placed symmetrically around two initial hand positions. Our main goal was to provide evidence in favor of the hypothesis that amplitude and direction of the movements are planned independently on the basis of the hand-target vector (vectorial parametric hypothesis, VP). The analysis was carried out mainly at the individual level. By screening a number of formal models of the potential error components, we found that only models compatible with the VP hypothesis provide an accurate description of the error pattern. A quantitative analysis showed that errors are explained mostly by a bias in the represented initial hand position (46% of the sum of squared errors) and a visuomotor gain bias (26%). Range effect (3%), directional biases (3%), and inertia-dependent amplitude modulations (1%) also provided significant contributions. The error pattern was incompatible with the view that movements are planned by specifying either a final posture or a final position. Instead, the results fully supported the view that, at least in the horizontal plane, amplitude, and direction of pointing movements are planned independently in a hand- or target-centered frame of reference.

Planning short pointing sequences.

An experiment tested the hypothesis that fast, short sequences of movements are planned as a whole, before movement inception. The experimental task consisted of pointing to either one (one-step condition), or two (two-step condition) visual targets aligned along the mid-sagittal axis in a horizontal plane. There were nine possible arrangements of the targets resulting from all combinations of three distances (5, 10, 15 cm), and two trial orders (blocked or random). Performances were characterised by reaction time (RT), movement kinematics, and spatial accuracy. Compared with one-step trials, the first movements of two-step trials had longer RTs (length effect), particularly in random sessions, and when the sequences included short-distance targets. There were also differences in duration (one-target advantage), velocity profile and spatial accuracy that did not depend on the characteristics of the second movement. The results are inconsistent with the assumption that two-step sequences are planned as a whole. Instead, they are in keeping with the alternative hypothesis that part of the preparation of the second step takes place during the execution of the first step.

Altering the visuomotor gain. Evidence that motor plans deal with vector quantities.

Two experiments investigated the effects of providing nonveridical knowledge of the results (KR) in a visuomanual task in which participants pointed to briefly (200 ms) presented targets without seeing their hand. By showing after each trial the movement endpoint displaced radially with respect to its true position, we were able to alter progressively the gain of the visuomanual loop. In experiment 1, the KR was provided only for transversal movements and for one target distance, but the effect generalized to all directions and all distances. Moreover, it also generalized to the other hand that had never been biased. In experiment 2, nonveridical KR was supplied for movements along the two major diagonals which require sharply different muscle synergies. The transfer to other directions and to the other hand was equally substantial. It is argued that the results support the vector coding hypothesis, which holds that the input to the motor execution stage is supplied by specifying independently the amplitude and the direction of the vector from the initial to the final position in an extrinsic frame of reference. We also discuss the possible brain structures involved in the biasing action of the KR.