Perception of Hand Location, Unlike Action, Is Not Affected by An Adaptation to A Sensorimotor Delay

When interacting with the environment, we receive information from different modalities that arrive at different times to the brain. As a result of active processes in the brain, we perceive these sensory inputs as a single simultaneous event. Recent studies showed that adaptation to a delayed sensory feedback leads to hypermetric reach movements, suggesting a possible change in the representation of the state of the hand. Here, we examined how delaying the vision and haptic feedbacks from the proprioception affects the explicit perception of hand location. Participants played a virtual game of pong, where the movement of the controlled paddle was delayed with respect to the movement of the participant`s hand. Then, they performed reach movements without visual feedback, followed by verbal assessments of their hand location. We found that while adaptation to a delayed feedback led to hypermetric reaches, it had no significant effect on the perception of hand location. This is a rare example of a disassociation between perception and action in which the action rather than the perception is biased.