An Implicit Plan Overrides an Explicit Strategy during Visuomotor Adaptation

By P. Mazzoni, John W. Krakauer. Journal of Neuroscience, 2006

810 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The relationship between implicit and explicit processes during motor learning, and for visuomotor adaptation in particular, is poorly understood. We set up a conflict between implicit and explicit processes by instructing subjects to counter a visuomotor rotation using a cognitive strategy in a pointing task. Specifically, they were told the exact nature of the directional perturbation, a rotation that directed them 45° counterclockwise from the desired target, and they were instructed to counter it by aiming for the neighboring clockwise target, 45° away. Subjects were initially successful in completely negating the rotation with this strategy. Surprisingly, however, they were unable to sustain explicit control and made increasingly large errors to the desired target. The cognitive strategy failed because subjects simultaneously adapted unconsciously to the rotation to the neighboring target. Notably, the rate of implicit adaptation to the neighboring target was not significantly different from rotation adaptation in the absence of an opposing explicit strategy. These results indicate that explicit strategies cannot substitute for implicit adaptation to a visuomotor rotation and are in fact overridden by the motor planning system. This suggests that the motor system requires that planned and executed trajectories remain congruous in visual space, and enforces this correspondence even at the expense of an opposing explicit task goal.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Developmental and Educational Psychology, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/663fb01ba99b627b7c1860f75535bd6944504c37

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Citations in the corpus

Motor Learning and Consolidation: The Case of Visuomotor Rotation (2009, methodology): “The strategy is shown in 2E, the subject aims for T N and the cursor will immediately go into T P because of the imposed CCW rotation (Mazzoni and Krakauer 2006 ).”
Brain plasticity related to the consolidation of motor sequence learning and motor adaptation (2010, background): “Indeed it has been suggested that an explicit strategy for MA would be counterproductive (32).”
Flexible Cognitive Strategies during Motor Learning (2011, methodology): “Mazzoni and Krakauer [9] suggested that drift reflects the interaction of the independent contribution of strategic and implicit learning processes in movement execution.”
Use-Dependent and Error-Based Learning of Motor Behaviors (2010, background): “For example, during visuomotor rotation task, error-based learning will produce fast, trial-by-trial adaptation, independent of task goals (Mazzoni and Krakauer, 2006) or movement corrections (Tseng et al., 2007).”
Explicit and Implicit Contributions to Learning in a Sensorimotor Adaptation Task (2014, methodology): “If a visual landmark is provided to help participants employ the instructed strategy, then over the course of training performance deteriorates with the cursor drifting in the opposite direction of the rotation (Mazzoni and Krakauer, 2006).”