Distinct role of central predictive mechanisms in tactile suppression.

Tactile sensitivity on a limb is reduced during movement. This tactile suppression results presumably from central predictive mechanisms that downregulate sensations caused during voluntary action. Suppression also occurs during passive movements, indicating a role for peripheral mechanisms, questioning the predictive nature of suppression.

Where was this thing again? Evaluating methods to indicate remembered object positions in virtual reality.

A current focus in sensorimotor research is the study of human perception and action in increasingly naturalistic tasks and visual environments. This is further enabled by the recent commercial success of virtual reality (VR) technology, which allows for highly realistic but well-controlled three-dimensional (3D) scenes. VR enables a multitude of different ways to interact with virtual objects, but only rarely are such interaction techniques evaluated and compared before being selected for a sensorimotor experiment.

Scene semantics affects allocentric spatial coding for action in naturalistic (virtual) environments.

Interacting with objects in our environment requires determining their locations, often with respect to surrounding objects (i.e., allocentrically).

The (Un)ideal Physicist: How Humans Rely on Object Interaction for Friction Estimates.

To estimate object properties such as mass or friction, our brain relies on visual information to efficiently compute approximations. The role of sensorimotor feedback, however, is not well understood. Here we tested healthy adults ( = 79) in an inclined-plane problem, that is, how much a plane can be tilted before an object starts to slide, and contrasted the interaction group with observation groups who accessed involved forces by watching objects being manipulated.

How visuomotor predictability and task demands affect tactile sensitivity on a moving limb during object interaction in a virtual environment.

Tactile sensitivity is decreased on a moving limb compared to the same static limb. This likely reflects an interplay between sensorimotor predictions and sensory feedback. Here, we examined how visuomotor predictability influences tactile suppression.