Biology subjects

Campagnoli, C.

Publications and source records attributed to Campagnoli, C..

7 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2026

Trait Absorption Amplifies the Path to Spatial Presence in Highly Immersive Virtual Reality: Attentional Mediation and Dose-Response Effects

Virtual Reality (VR) applications depend on eliciting spatial presence, the subjective experience of being physically located within a virtual environment. Although individual differences have long been theorised to contribute to this experience, their role in highly immersive VR systems remains contested. The present study investigated whether trait absorption predicts spatial presence and whether this relationship is mediated by attention allocation. Seventy participants (44 female, 26 male; M age = 22.90, SD = 4.88) completed a 6-minute VR session using a Meta Quest 3 Head-Mounted Display and validated self-report measures of trait absorption (Tellegen Absorption Scale), attention allocation, and spatial presence (MEC-Spatial Presence Questionnaire). Path analysis confirmed a significant, complete mediation pathway: trait absorption positively predicted attention allocation ({beta} = 0.27, p = .013), which in turn strongly predicted spatial presence ({beta} = 0.54, p < .001). The direct path from absorption to spatial presence was non-significant ({beta} = 0.11, p = .325), indicating complete mediation. The indirect effect was significant ({beta} = 0.15; 95% BCa CI [0.025, 0.291]). The model explained a sizeable 33.8% of the variance in spatial presence (Cohens f{superscript 2} = 0.51). Post-hoc dose-response analysis revealed that trait absorption acts as a cognitive amplifier: the strength of the attention-presence relationship tripled from low-absorption ({beta} = 0.33, R{superscript 2} = .15) to high-absorption individuals ({beta} = 1.00, R{superscript 2} = .56). These findings demonstrate that individual differences remain important in highly immersive VR by modulating the effectiveness of attentional focus, offering promising directions for tailoring VR interventions.

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bioRxiv2025

Visual blur disrupts the kinematic and temporal aspects of reach-grasp-lift movements.

Degraded vision (caused by pathological reasons or monocular viewing) has been shown to affect fine motor control. However, there is a dearth of work examining the effects of "cataract-like" blur on reach-to-grasp performance. There is, however, a trend towards amblyopic blur being associated with deficits in reach-to-grasp performance, suggesting that timely intervention in treating cataracts is likely to be essential to maintain a functional ageing population. 18 participants performed a reach-to-grasp task. They reached for and precision grasped high and low-contrast cuboid targets under three visual conditions: binocular blur, monocular blur (full vision in the other eye) and full vision. They also performed contrast sensitivity, stereoacuity and visual acuity tests. Visual blur was associated with changes to the kinematics of prehensile movements early/acceleration stage (maximum acceleration and maximum velocity) and maximum grip aperture. Visual blur also caused the period from first contact with the target to the time it was lifted (dwell time) to be elongated. These results suggest that changes in prehension associated with visual blur are linked to differences in the planning and online control of prehension movements.

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bioRxiv2025

An 'Aha!' moment precedes the strategic response to a visuomotor rotation

Strategic behaviour in sensorimotor adaptation tasks is typically described as either a gradual error minimisation process or as a process of learning through trial-and-error. The former predicts a gradual monotonic reduction in error, until some asymptote, while the latter predicts behavioural exploration to discover an efficacious solution. Another explanation is that a sufficiently rich understanding of the task culminates in an "Aha!" moment, and that this richer understanding naturally entails a new strategy. This predicts some period of perseveration in baseline behaviour, followed by an abrupt shift to a new strategic solution. To avoid obfuscation caused by the motor system, we first investigate these hypotheses in a strategy-only aiming game, where participants aim and fire a cannon at targets. Most participants exhibited a period of baseline perseveration followed by a single-trial shift to a distinct strategy. This strategy typically appears to produce the correct compensatory magnitude for a noisily estimated perturbation, but also substantial variability in compensatory sign. We then applied the same analyses to reaching data from a visuomotor rotation task that inhibited implicit adaptation through delaying feedback presentation. Similarly, we found that participants typically perseverated in reaching towards the target before suddenly switching, in a single trial, to good performance in compensatory magnitude. We fit our generative "Aha!" model to 1337 participants across several datasets and show that it faithfully captures these phenomena. Our findings highlight the need to update existing models to account for the abrupt, insight-driven shifts that characterise individual human responses to sensorimotor perturbations.

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bioRxiv2023

Visuomotor memory is not bound to visual motion

Sensory feedback plays a critical role in motor control and motor learning, with both processes adjusting outgoing motor commands relative to the error between actual sensory feedback and the predictions of a forward model. However, models of motor control rarely specify the exact nature of these predictions. We hypothesized that large differences in low-level perceptual feedback would delineate contextual boundaries for motor memory, as sufficiently different feedback would require a distinct mapping between motor commands and sensory states. We tested this hypothesis by measuring transfer of visuomotor adaptation across contexts where hand movements caused visual motion in opposite directions. Instead of observing that visual feedback is bound to distinct internal models, we found nearly complete transfer of learning across the contexts, with evidence that the motor memory was bound to the planned displacement of the hand, rather than visual features of the task space.

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bioRxiv2023

Kinematic markers of skill in first-person shooter video games

Video games present a unique opportunity to study motor skill. First-person shooter (FPS) games have particular utility because they require visually-guided hand movements that are similar to widely studied planar reaching tasks. However, there is a need to ensure the tasks are equivalent if FPS games are to yield their potential as a powerful scientific tool for investigating sensorimotor control. Specifically, research is needed to ensure that differences in visual feedback of a movement do not affect motor learning between the two contexts. In traditional tasks, a movement will translate a cursor across a static background, whereas FPS games use movements to pan and tilt the view of the environment. To this end, we designed an online experiment where participants used their mouse or trackpad to shoot targets in both contexts. Kinematic analysis showed player movements were nearly identical between conditions, with highly correlated spatial and temporal metrics. This similarity suggests a shared internal model based on comparing predicted and observed displacement vectors, rather than primary sensory feedback. A second experiment, modelled on FPS-style aim-trainer games, found movements exhibited classic invariant features described within the sensorimotor literature. We found that two measures of mouse control, the mean and variability in distance of the primary sub-movement, were key predictors of overall task success. More broadly, these results show that FPS games offer a novel, engaging, and compelling environment to study sensorimotor skill, providing the same precise kinematic metrics as traditional planar reaching tasks. Significance statementSensorimotor control underpins human behaviour and is a predictor of education, health, and socioemotional wellbeing. First-person shooter (FPS) games hold promise for studying sensorimotor control at scale, but the visual feedback provided differs from traditional laboratory tasks. There is a need to ensure they provide measures that relate to traditional tasks. We designed an experiment where the visual contingency of movements could be varied whilst participants shot targets. Participants movements were similar between contexts, suggesting the use of a common internal model despite the sensory differences. A second experiment observed canonical learning patterns with practice and found two measures of mouse control strongly predicted overall performance. Our results highlight the opportunity offered by FPS games to study situated skilled behaviour.

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bioRxiv2021

Taking aim at the perceptual side of motor learning: Exploring how explicit and implicit learning encode perceptual error information through depth vision

Motor learning in visuomotor adaptation tasks results from both explicit and implicit processes, each responding differently to an error signal. While the motor output side of these processes is extensively studied, their visual input side is relatively unknown. We investigated if and how depth perception affects the computation of error information by explicit and implicit motor learning. Two groups of participants threw virtual darts at a virtual dartboard while receiving perturbed endpoint feedback. The Delayed group was allowed to re-aim and their feedback was delayed to emphasize explicit learning, while the Clamped group received clamped cursor feedback which they were told to ignore, and continued to aim straight at the target to emphasize implicit adaptation. Both groups played this game in a highly detailed virtual environment (Depth condition) and in an empty environment (No-Depth condition). The Delayed group showed an increase in error sensitivity under Depth relative to No-Depth conditions. In contrast, the Clamped group adapted to the same degree under both conditions. The movement kinematics of the Delayed participants also changed under the Depth condition, consistent with the target appearing more distant, unlike the Clamped group. A comparison of the Delayed behavioral data with a perceptual task from the same individuals showed that the effect of the Depth condition on the re-aiming direction was consistent with an increase in the scaling of the error distance and size. These findings suggest that explicit and implicit learning processes may rely on different sources of perceptual information. New & NoteworthyWe leveraged a classic sensorimotor adaptation task to perform a first systematic assessment of the role of perceptual cues in the estimation of an error signal in the 3D space during motor learning. We crossed two conditions presenting different amounts of depth information, with two manipulations emphasizing explicit and implicit learning processes. Explicit learning responded to the visual conditions, consistent with perceptual reports, while implicit learning appeared to be independent of them.

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bioRxiv2021

Explicit and implicit depth-cue integration: evidence of systematic biases with real objects

In a previous series of experiments using virtual stimuli, we found evidence that 3D shape estimation agrees to a superadditivity rule of depth-cue combination. According to this rule, adding depth cues leads to greater perceived depth magnitudes and, in principle, to depth overestimation. The mechanism underlying the superadditivity effect can be fully accounted for by a normative theory of cue integration, through the adaptation of a model of cue integration termed the Intrinsic Constraint (IC) model. As for its nature, it remains unclear whether superadditivity is a byproduct of the artificial nature of virtual environments, causing explicit reasoning to infiltrate behavior and inflate the depth judgments when a scene is richer in depth cues, or the genuine output of the process of depth-cue integration. In the present study, we addressed this question by testing whether the IC models prediction of superadditivity generalizes beyond VR environments to real world situations. We asked participants to judge the perceived 3D shape of cardboard prisms through a matching task. To assay the potential influence of explicit control over those perceptual estimates, we also asked participants to reach and hold the same objects with their fingertips and we analyzed the in-flight grip size during the reaching. Using physical objects ensured that all visual information was fully consistent with the stimulis 3D structure without computer-generated artifacts. We designed a novel technique to carefully control binocular and monocular 3D cues independently from one another, allowing to add or remove depth information from the scene seamlessly. Even with real objects, participants exhibited a clear superadditivity effect in both explicit and implicit tasks. Furthermore, the magnitude of this effect was accurately predicted by the IC model. These results confirm that superadditivity is an inherent feature of depth estimation.

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