Visuomotor Transformation for the Lead Leg Affects Trail Leg Trajectories During Visually Guided Crossing Over a Virtual Obstacle in Humans

When walking around a room or outside, we often need to negotiate external physical objects, such as walking up stairs or stepping over an obstacle. In previous studies on obstacle avoidance, lead and trail legs in humans have been considered to be controlled independently on the basis of visual input regarding obstacle properties. However, this perspective has not been sufficient because the influence of visuomotor transformation in the lead leg on the trail leg has not been fully elucidated due to technical limitations in the experimental tasks of stepping over physical obstacles. In this study, we investigated how visuomotor transformation in the lead leg affected movement trajectories in the trail leg using a visually guided task of crossing over a virtual obstacle. Trials for stepping over a physical obstacle were established followed by visually guided tasks in which cursors corresponding to the subject’s lead and trail limb toe positions were displayed on a head-mounted display apparatus. Subjects were instructed to manipulate the cursors so that they precisely crossover a virtual obstacle. In the middle of the trials, the vertical displacement of the cursor only in the lead leg was reduced relative to the actual toe movement during one or two consecutive trials. This visuomotor perturbation resulted in higher elevation not only in the lead limb toe position but also in the trail limb toe trajectories, and then the toe heights returned to the baseline in washout trials, indicating that the visuomotor transformation for obstacle avoidance in the lead leg affects the trail leg trajectory. Taken together, neural resources of limb-specific motor memories for obstacle crossing movements in the lead and trail legs can be shared based on visual input regarding obstacle properties.