TY  - JOUR
A1  - Reuschel, Johanna
A1  - Rösler, Frank
A1  - Henriques, Denise Y. P.
A1  - Fiehler, Katja
T1  - Spatial updating depends on gaze direction even after loss of vision
JF  - The journal of neuroscience
N2  - Direction of gaze (eye angle + head angle) has been shown to be important for representing space for action, implying a crucial role of vision for spatial updating. However, blind people have no access to vision yet are able to perform goal-directed actions successfully. Here, we investigated the role of visual experience for localizing and updating targets as a function of intervening gaze shifts in humans. People who differed in visual experience (late blind, congenitally blind, or sighted) were briefly presented with a proprioceptive reach target while facing it. Before they reached to the target's remembered location, they turned their head toward an eccentric direction that also induced corresponding eye movements in sighted and late blind individuals. We found that reaching errors varied systematically as a function of shift in gaze direction only in participants with early visual experience (sighted and late blind). In the late blind, this effect was solely present in people with moveable eyes but not in people with at least one glass eye. Our results suggest that the effect of gaze shifts on spatial updating develops on the basis of visual experience early in life and remains even after loss of vision as long as feedback from the eyes and head is available.
Y1  - 2012
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2714-11.2012
SN  - 0270-6474
VL  - 32
IS  - 7
SP  - 2422
EP  - 2429
PB  - Society for Neuroscience
CY  - Washington
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Seemüller, Anna
A1  - Fiehler, Katja
A1  - Rösler, Frank
T1  - Unimodal and crossmodal working memory representations of visual and kinesthetic movement trajectories
JF  - Acta psychologica : international journal of psychonomics
N2  - The present study investigated whether visual and kinesthetic stimuli are stored as multisensory or modality-specific representations in unimodal and crossmodal working memory tasks. To this end, angle-shaped movement trajectories were presented to 16 subjects in delayed matching-to-sample tasks either visually or kinesthetically during encoding and recognition. During the retention interval, a secondary visual or kinesthetic interference task was inserted either immediately or with a delay after encoding. The modality of the interference task interacted significantly with the encoding modality. After visual encoding, memory was more impaired by a visual than by a kinesthetic secondary task, while after kinesthetic encoding the pattern was reversed. The time when the secondary task had to be performed interacted with the encoding modality as well. For visual encoding, memory was more impaired, when the secondary task had to be performed at the beginning of the retention interval. In contrast, memory after kinesthetic encoding was more affected, when the secondary task was introduced later in the retention interval. The findings suggest that working memory traces are maintained in a modality-specific format characterized by distinct consolidation processes that take longer after kinesthetic than after visual encoding.
KW  - Visual representations
KW  - Kinesthetic representations
KW  - Vision
KW  - Haptics
KW  - Dual-task interference
Y1  - 2011
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actpsy.2010.09.014
SN  - 0001-6918
VL  - 136
IS  - 1
SP  - 52
EP  - 59
PB  - Elsevier
CY  - Amsterdam
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Fiehler, Katja
A1  - Bannert, Michael M.
A1  - Bischoff, Matthias
A1  - Blecker, Carlo
A1  - Stark, Rudolf
A1  - Vaitl, Dieter
A1  - Franz, Volker H.
A1  - Roesler, Frank
T1  - Working memory maintenance of grasp-target information in the human posterior parietal cortex
JF  - NeuroImage : a journal of brain function
N2  - Event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging was applied to identify cortical areas involved in maintaining target information in working memory used for an upcoming grasping action. Participants had to grasp with their thumb and index finger of the dominant right hand three-dimensional objects of different size and orientation. Reaching-to-grasp movements were performed without visual feedback either immediately after object presentation or after a variable delay of 2-12 s. The right inferior parietal cortex demonstrated sustained neural activity throughout the delay, which overlapped with activity observed during encoding of the grasp target. Immediate and delayed grasping activated similar motor-related brain areas and showed no differential activity. The results suggest that the right inferior parietal cortex plays an important functional role in working memory maintenance of grasp-related information. Moreover, our findings confirm the assumption that brain areas engaged in maintaining information are also involved in encoding the same information, and thus extend previous findings on working memory function of the posterior parietal cortex in saccadic behavior to reach-to-grasp movements.
Y1  - 2011
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2010.09.080
SN  - 1053-8119
VL  - 54
IS  - 3
SP  - 2401
EP  - 2411
PB  - Elsevier
CY  - San Diego
ER  -