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Knowing Each Random Error of Our Ways, but Hardly Correcting for It: An Instance of Optimal Performance

Dam, Loes C. J. van ; Ernst, Marc O. (2024)
Knowing Each Random Error of Our Ways, but Hardly Correcting for It: An Instance of Optimal Performance.
In: PLoS ONE, 2013, 8 (10)
doi: 10.26083/tuprints-00027548
Article, Secondary publication, Publisher's Version

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Item Type: Article
Type of entry: Secondary publication
Title: Knowing Each Random Error of Our Ways, but Hardly Correcting for It: An Instance of Optimal Performance
Language: English
Date: 23 July 2024
Place of Publication: Darmstadt
Year of primary publication: 2013
Place of primary publication: San Francisco
Publisher: PLOS
Journal or Publication Title: PLoS ONE
Volume of the journal: 8
Issue Number: 10
Collation: 9 Seiten
DOI: 10.26083/tuprints-00027548
Corresponding Links:
Origin: Secondary publication service
Abstract:

Random errors are omnipresent in sensorimotor tasks due to perceptual and motor noise. The question is, are humans aware of their random errors on an instance-by-instance basis? The appealing answer would be ‘no’ because it seems intuitive that humans would otherwise immediately correct for the errors online, thereby increasing sensorimotor precision. However, here we show the opposite. Participants pointed to visual targets with varying degree of feedback. After movement completion participants indicated whether they believed they landed left or right of target. Surprisingly, participants' left/right-discriminability was well above chance, even without visual feedback. Only when forced to correct for the error after movement completion did participants loose knowledge about the remaining error, indicating that random errors can only be accessed offline. When correcting, participants applied the optimal correction gain, a weighting factor between perceptual and motor noise, minimizing end-point variance. Together these results show that humans optimally combine direct information about sensorimotor noise in the system (the current random error), with indirect knowledge about the variance of the perceptual and motor noise distributions. Yet, they only appear to do so offline after movement completion, not while the movement is still in progress, suggesting that during movement proprioceptive information is less precise.

Identification Number: Artikel-ID: e78757
Status: Publisher's Version
URN: urn:nbn:de:tuda-tuprints-275484
Classification DDC: 100 Philosophy and psychology > 150 Psychology
600 Technology, medicine, applied sciences > 610 Medicine and health
Date Deposited: 23 Jul 2024 14:06
Last Modified: 24 Jul 2024 13:30
URI: https://tuprints.ulb.tu-darmstadt.de/id/eprint/27548
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