Human Sensorimotor Cortex Represents Conflicting Visuomotor Mappings

Behavioral studies have shown that humans can adapt to conflicting sensorimotor mappings that cause interference after intensive training. While previous research works indicate the involvement of distinct brain regions for different types of motor learning (e.g., kinematics vs dynamics), the neural mechanisms underlying joint adaptation to conflicting mappings within the same type of perturbation (e.g., different angles of visuomotor rotation) remain unclear. To reveal the neural substrates that represent multiple sensorimotor mappings, we examined whether different mappings could be classified with multivoxel activity patterns of functional magnetic resonance imaging data. Participants simultaneously adapted to opposite rotational perturbations (+90° and − 90°) during visuomotor tracking. To dissociate differences in movement kinematics with rotation types, we used two distinct patterns of target motion and tested generalization of the classifier between different combinations of rotation and motion types. Results showed that the rotation types were classified significantly above chance using activities in the primary sensorimotor cortex and the supplementary motor area, despite no significant difference in averaged signal amplitudes within the region. In contrast, low-level sensorimotor components, including tracking error and movement speed, were best classified using activities of the early visual cortex. Our results reveal that the sensorimotor cortex represents different visuomotor mappings, which permits joint learning and switching between conflicting sensorimotor skills.

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