How visual experience impacts the internal and external spatial mapping of sensorimotor functions

Tactile perception and motor production share the use of internally- and externally-defined coordinates. In order to examine how visual experience affects the internal/external coding of space for touch and movement, early blind (EB) and sighted controls (SC) took part in two experiments. In experiment 1, participants were required to perform a Temporal Order Judgment task (TOJ), either with their hands in parallel or crossed over the body midline. Confirming previous demonstration, crossing the hands led to a significant decrement in performance in SC but did not affect EB. In experiment 2, participants were trained to perform a sequence of five-finger movements. They were tested on their ability to produce, with the same hand but with the keypad turned upside down, the learned (internal) or the mirror (external) sequence. We observed significant transfer of motor sequence knowledge in both EB and SC irrespective of whether the representation of the sequence was internal or external. Together, these results demonstrate that visual experience differentially impacts the automatic weight attributed to internal versus external coordinates depending on task-specific spatial requirements.