Sensory-motor processes

The group has interest in several topics related to motor planning processes in general, and sensory-motor processes involved in action planning in particular. These studies have mainly used behavioural methods but also EEG, TMS and fMRI methods have been used to explore these issues. The studies can be roughly divided into two main research lines from which one is associated with 1) interaction between sensory and hand motor processes, and the other is associated with 2) speech-related motor planning. Better details of the papers that are cited below can be found from https://tuhat.halvi.helsinki.fi/portal/fi/persons/lari-vainio%2861f6c9e8-889a-4912-a9ab-c03f22d9b5e0%29/publications.html

1: Sensory-motor integration related to planning of hand actions:

These studies have shown automatic motor activation of manual responses triggered by visual presentation of orientation-affordance (Vainio, Ellis, & Tucker, 2007), size-affordance (e.g., Vainio, Ellis, Tucker & Symes, 2008), grip type (Vainio, Tucker & Ellis, 2007), hand identity (Vainio & Mustonen, 2011), gaze direction (Vainio et al., 2014) as well as auditory presentation of spatially oriented tone (Paavilainen et al., 2016).

Some of these studies have focused on exploring inhibition mechanisms related to motor activation triggered by perceived stimuli. We have shown, for example, that hand motor activation is immediately inhibited if the activation is triggered by distractor object (Ellis et al., 2007) or if the object that triggers the activation is removed from the display prior to onset of the response (e.g., Vainio et al., 2013) or during the hand movement (Vainio, 2013).

This line of research has also investigated how motor planning of manual actions influences perceptual processes. We have shown, for example, that the precision and power grasp performance modulates activation in auditory cortex (Wikman, Vainio & Rinne, 2015), and that preparation of these grasp types facilitates detection of those visually presented objects whose size is congruent with the prepared grasp type (Symes et al., 2008).

2: Speech-related motor planning:

This line of research has focused on investigating how processes involved in planning articulatory gestures and hand actions are integrated. We have shown, for example, that EMG responses of hand muscles are increased by the TMS stimulation applied to hand motor area if participants are pronouncing meaningless syllables during the stimulation (Komeilipoor et al., 2016). Furthermore, we have shown that processes involved in planning certain articulatory gestures are systematically connected to processes that are involved in planning grasp actions (e.g., Vainio et al., 2013), and to processes that are involved in planning forward-backward hand movements (Vainio et al., 2015). Finally, we have shown that perception of different object shapes (round vs. sharp) can modulate processes involved in planning articulatory gestures (Vainio et al., 2016). Production of round vowels and voiced bilabial consonant are facilitated by round shapes whereas production of un-round vowels and alveolar stop consonant are facilitated by sharp shapes.