Séminaire ISM du lundi 6 octobre 2025

de 11 à 12h en salle X

Title: The relativity of reaching: Motion of the touched surface alters the trajectory of hand movements

by Dr Alessandro Moscatelli (Dept of Systems Medecine, University of Rome Tor Vergata: Rome, Italy), invited by Jean Blouin

Abstract

Humans rely on the integration of sensory information and prior knowledge to achieve dexterous hand control. A key prior is that inanimate objects remain stationary upon contact—but what happens when this assumption is violated? Using robotic interfaces that displaced or resisted participants’ fingertip movements, we found that tactile cues were integrated with proprioception in ways that produced systematic motor errors, revealing the powerful influence of the stationarity prior. Moreover, adaptation to these perturbations was limited, occurring only with visual feedback and even then leaving residual errors. Together, these findings highlight the constraints of sensory integration and adaptation in the presence of violated priors, with broad implications for the design of haptic technologies and human–machine collaboration.

Biosketch

Alessandro Moscatelli received a Medical Doctor degree and a postgraduate master’s degree in biostatistics from the University of Rome ‘Tor Vergata’ in 2006 and 2008, respectively. He received the PhD in Neuroscience from University of Rome ‘Tor Vergata’ in 2010, under supervision of Prof. F. Lacquaniti. From 2011 to 2015, he worked as Post Doc at the Department of Cognitive Neuroscience and CITEC of the Bielefeld University (Germany), led by Prof. M.O. Ernst. He is currently Associate Professor at the Department of Systems Medicine, University of Rome “Tor Vergata” and leader of the Haptics Team at Laboratory of Neuromotor Physiology, Santa Lucia Foundation IRCCS.