Motor adaptation distorts visual space

It has been suggested that the human visual system exploits an adaptable metric to implement a precise but plastic spatial representation. Indeed, adapting to a dense dot-texture reduces the apparent separation of subsequently presented dots pairs. Whether this metric is purely visual or shared between senses is still unknown. Here we present a new cross-modal after-effect revealing that the metric with which the visual system computes the relative spatial position of objects is shared with the motor system. A few seconds of mid-air self-produced tapping movements (adaptation) yielded a robust compression of the apparent separation of dot pairs subsequently displayed around the tapping region. This visuo-motor spatial metric could reflect an efficient functional architecture to program and execute actions aimed at efficient interaction with the objects in the environment.