Use-Dependent and Error-Based Learning of Motor Behaviors

By Jörn Diedrichsen, Olivier White, D. Newman, Níall Lally. Journal of Neuroscience, 2010

377 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Human motor behavior is constantly adapted through the process of error-based learning. When the motor system encounters an error, its estimate about the body and environment will change, and the next movement will be immediately modified to counteract the underlying perturbation. Here, we show that a second mechanism, use-dependent learning, simultaneously changes movements to become more similar to the last movement. In three experiments, participants made reaching movements toward a horizontally elongated target, such that errors in the initial movement direction did not have to be corrected. Along this task-redundant dimension, we were able to induce use-dependent learning by passively guiding movements in a direction angled by 8° from the previous direction. In a second study, we show that error-based and use-dependent learning can change motor behavior simultaneously in opposing directions by physically constraining the direction of active movements. After removal of the constraint, participants briefly exhibit an error-based aftereffect against the direction of the constraint, followed by a longer-lasting use-dependent aftereffect in the direction of the constraint. In the third experiment, we show that these two learning mechanisms together determine the solution the motor system adopts when learning a motor task.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Cognitive Neuroscience, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2f143286edbca5b1ebe410de1512602ed3dbca6b

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Citations in the corpus

Principles of sensorimotor learning (2011, background): “A third study showed that use-dependent learning can occur in parallel with error-based learning 75 .”