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Cerebral Cortex Advance Access originally published online on February 8, 2007
Cerebral Cortex 2007 17(11):2644-2649; doi:10.1093/cercor/bhl172
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© 2007 The Authors
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/uk/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Visually Guided Reaching Depends on Motion Area MT+

David Whitney1,2, Amanda Ellison3, Nichola J. Rice4, Derek Arnold5, Melvyn Goodale6, Vincent Walsh7 and David Milner3

1 The Center for Mind and Brain, 2 The Department of Psychology, The University of California, Davis, CA, USA, 3 Wolfson Research, University of Durham, Durham, UK, 4 Volen Center for Complex Systems, Brandeis University, MA, USA, 5 The School of Psychology, The University of Queensland, Australia, 6 The University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada, 7 The Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, London, UK

Address correspondence to email: dwhitney{at}ucdavis.edu.

Visual information is crucial for goal-directed reaching. A number of studies have recently shown that motion in particular is an important source of information for the visuomotor system. For example, when reaching a stationary object, movement of the background can influence the trajectory of the hand, even when the background motion is irrelevant to the object and task. This manual following response may be a compensatory response to changes in body position, but the underlying mechanism remains unclear. Here we tested whether visual motion area MT+ is necessary to generate the manual following response. We found that stimulation of MT+ with transcranial magnetic stimulation significantly reduced a strong manual following response. MT+ is therefore necessary for generating the manual following response, indicating that it plays a crucial role in guiding goal-directed reaching movements by taking into account background motion in scenes.

Key Words: action • localization • manual following response • perception • pointing • TMS • visuomotor

Funding to pay the Open Access publication charges for this article was provided by the University of California, Davis.


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