Self-operated stimuli improve subsequent visual motion integration

Evidences of perceptual changes that accompany motor activity have been limited primarily to audition and somatosensation. Here we asked whether motor learning results in changes to visual motion perception. We designed a reaching task in which participants were trained to make movements along several directions, while the visual feedback was provided by an intrinsically ambiguous moving stimulus directly tied to hand motion. We find that training improves coherent motion perception and that changes in movement are correlated with perceptual changes. No perceptual changes are observed in passive training even when observers were provided with an explicit strategy to facilitate single motion perception. A Bayesian model suggests that movement training promotes the fine-tuning of the internal representation of stimulus geometry. These results emphasize the role of sensorimotor interaction in determining the persistent properties in space and time that define a percept.