Loss of haptic feedback impairs control of hand posture: a study in chronically deafferented individuals when grasping and lifting objects.

Previous work has highlighted the role of haptic feedback for manual dexterity, in particular for the control of precision grip forces between the index finger and thumb. It is unclear how fine motor skills involving more than just two digits might be affected, especially given that loss of sensation from the hand affects many neurological patients, and impacts on everyday actions. To assess the functional consequences of haptic deficits on multi-digit grasp of objects, we studied the ability of three rare individuals with permanent large-fibre sensory loss involving the entire upper limb.

Correction to: Boosting robot-assisted rehabilitation of stroke hemiparesis by individualized selection of upper limb movements - a pilot study.

The original article [1] contained a minor error in the following sentence in the Discussion.

Boosting robot-assisted rehabilitation of stroke hemiparesis by individualized selection of upper limb movements - a pilot study.

Background: Intensive robot-assisted training of the upper limb after stroke can reduce motor impairment, even at the chronic stage. However, the effectiveness of practice for recovery depends on the selection of the practised movements. We hypothesized that rehabilitation can be optimized by selecting the movements to be practiced based on the trainee's performance profile.

Mapping upper-limb motor performance after stroke - a novel method with utility for individualized motor training.

Background: Chronic upper limb motor impairment is a common outcome of stroke. Therapeutic training can reduce motor impairment. Recently, a growing interest in evaluating motor training provided by robotic assistive devices has emerged.

A role of 3-D surface-from-motion cues in motion-induced blindness.

Motion-induced blindness (MIB), the illusory disappearance of local targets against a moving mask, has been attributed to both low-level stimulus-based effects and high-level processes, involving selection between local and more global stimulus contexts. Prior work shows that MIB is modulated by binocular disparity-based depth-ordering cues. We assessed whether the depth effect is specific to disparity by studying how monocular 3-D surface from motion affects MIB.

Perceptual organization without perception. The subliminal learning of global contour.

A critical step in visual perceptual processing is integrating local visual elements into contours so that shapes can be derived from them. It is often assumed that contour integration may reflect hardwired coding of low-level visual features. In this study, we present novel evidence indicating that integration of local elements into contours can be learned subliminally, despite being irrelevant to the training task and despite the local properties of the display varying randomly during training.

Sound-induced flash illusion is resistant to feedback training.

A single flash accompanied by two auditory beeps tends to be perceived as two flashes (Shams et al. Nature 408:788, 2000, Cogn Brain Res 14:147-152, 2002). This phenomenon is known as 'sound-induced flash illusion.

Acquiring long-term representations of visual classes following extensive extrastriate damage.

Different areas of human visual cortex are thought to play different roles in the learning of visual information: whereas in low/intermediate cortical areas, plasticity may be manifested by enhanced selectivity to learned visual features, in higher-level areas, plasticity may result in generalization and development of tolerance to degraded versions of the learned stimuli. The most effective tolerance to degraded information is presumably achieved in the case of cooperation between the different forms of plasticity. Whether this tolerance to degraded information also applies when the visual input is degraded as a result of a lesion to lower levels of the visual system remains an open question.