Action-blindsight in healthy subjects after transcranial magnetic stimulation

Research output: Contribution to journalJournal articlepeer-review

Clinical cases of blindsight have shown that visually guided movements can be accomplished without conscious visual perception. Here, we show that blindsight can be induced in healthy subjects by using transcranial magnetic stimulation over the visual cortex. Transcranial magnetic stimulation blocked the conscious perception of a visual stimulus, but subjects still corrected an ongoing reaching movement in response to the stimulus. The data show that correction of reaching movements does not require conscious perception of a visual target stimulus, even in healthy people. Our results support previous results suggesting that an efference copy is involved in movement correction, and this mechanism seems to be consistent even for movement correction without perception.
Original languageEnglish
JournalProceedings of the National Academy of Science of the United States of America
Volume105
Issue number4
Pages (from-to)1353-1357
Number of pages5
ISSN0027-8424
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2008

ID: 3592449