Influence of gaze direction on pointing to unseen proprioceptive targets

The question of how sensory information is encoded and integrated for goal-directed movements is a major topic in action research. Here we studied the influence of the direction of gaze on a task in which healthy individuals were required to point to their own unseen fingertip. An effect of the position of gaze on pointing, leading to pointing errors in the direction opposite to the gaze position, was obtained in the range of 11° but vanished for 22°. These results suggest that targets of aiming movements performed with an unseen arm may be encoded in retinal coordinates even when the target is encoded in a nonvisual modality and remains unseen.