Flexible Cognitive Strategies during Motor Learning

By Jordan A. Taylor, Richard B. Ivry. PLoS Comput. Biol., 2011

337 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Visuomotor rotation tasks have proven to be a powerful tool to study adaptation of the motor system. While adaptation in such tasks is seemingly automatic and incremental, participants may gain knowledge of the perturbation and invoke a compensatory strategy. When provided with an explicit strategy to counteract a rotation, participants are initially very accurate, even without on-line feedback. Surprisingly, with further testing, the angle of their reaching movements drifts in the direction of the strategy, producing an increase in endpoint errors. This drift is attributed to the gradual adaptation of an internal model that operates independently from the strategy, even at the cost of task accuracy. Here we identify constraints that influence this process, allowing us to explore models of the interaction between strategic and implicit changes during visuomotor adaptation. When the adaptation phase was extended, participants eventually modified their strategy to offset the rise in endpoint errors. Moreover, when we removed visual markers that provided external landmarks to support a strategy, the degree of drift was sharply attenuated. These effects are accounted for by a setpoint state-space model in which a strategy is flexibly adjusted to offset performance errors arising from the implicit adaptation of an internal model. More generally, these results suggest that strategic processes may operate in many studies of visuomotor adaptation, with participants arriving at a synergy between a strategic plan and the effects of sensorimotor adaptation.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b4c98451767f14b2d94197131d034cf061e2402c

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Cognitive Neuroscience

1. Jordan A. Taylor
2. Richard B. Ivry
3. John W. Krakauer
4. Gregory Hickok
5. Simon L. Grondin

In Developmental and Educational Psychology

1. Jordan A. Taylor
2. Richard B. Ivry
3. John W. Krakauer

In Social Psychology

1. Jordan A. Taylor
2. Richard B. Ivry
3. John W. Krakauer
4. Gregory Hickok

Citations in the corpus

• Explicit and Implicit Contributions to Learning in a Sensorimotor Adaptation Task (2014, methodology): “Indeed, the saliency of the sensory-prediction error is critical with respect to implicit learning, such that when the landmark is absent participants are still able to employ the strategy to reduce target error but at the cost of reduced implicit learning (Benson et al., 2011; Taylor and Ivry, 2011”