Effect of sensory experience on motor learning strategy

Zhou, Shou-Han, Oetomo, Denny, Tan, Ying, Mareels, Iven and Burdet, Etienne 2015. Effect of sensory experience on motor learning strategy. Journal of Neurophysiology 113 (4) , pp. 1077-1084. 10.1152/jn.00470.2014

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Abstract

It is well known that the central nervous system automatically reduces a mismatch in the visuomotor coordination. Can the underlying learning strategy be modified by environmental factors or a subject's learning experiences? To elucidate this matter, two groups of subjects learned to execute reaching arm movements in environments with task-irrelevant visual cues. However, one group had previous experience of learning these movements using task-relevant visual cues. The results demonstrate that the two groups used different learning strategies for the same visual environment and that the learning strategy was influenced by prior learning experience. humans have the ability to learn with visual deformations effectively, as was demonstrated through the use of prismatic glasses (Helmholtz and von Southall 1925; Harris 1963; Redding and Wallace 1996; Pisella et al. 2006; Michel et al. 2007). To systematically analyze visuomotor coordination learning, recent works have observed modifications to arm-reaching movements when visual feedback is affected during the movement (Flanagan et al. 1999; Krakauer et al. 2000; Scheidt et al. 2005). This learning was interpreted by processes involving sensory prediction (Tseng et al. 2007; Sarlegna and Sainburg 2009; Wei and Kording 2010; Marko et al. 2012; Schaefer et al. 2012) and adjustment to feed-forward muscle inputs (Wang 2005; Shabbott and Sainburg 2010). In all cases, compensation for the mismatch between the hand and the cursor movements was modeled as the gradual modification of the planned trajectory across trials (Wolpert et al. 2011; Haith and Krakauer 2013; Seidler et al. 2013). This minimization of the error between the hand and the visual target can be interpreted as the optimization of a particular set of factors associated with the human and with the environment (Todorov and Jordan 2002; Criscimagna-Hemminger et al. 2010). However, a mismatch of the visuomotor coordination is not always gradually reduced over trials. In particular, subjects have been observed to learn through switching of the planned movements, as is evident from observation that humans are able to learn multiple visuomotor rotations at one time (Ganesh and Burdet 2013), or through the strategy of ignoring the visual disturbances that do not affect the task outcome, (i.e., task-irrelevant disturbances) (Franklin and Wolpert 2008; van Beers et al. 2013). While the works discussed above show how the mismatch of hand and visual target is reduced by learning, this article investigates whether this mismatch can affect the learning strategy itself. The above learning strategies/processes may rely on visual reflexes as proposed in recent works (Day and Lyon 2000; Saijo et al. 2005; Franklin and Wolpert 2008; Franklin et al. 2012), i.e., involuntary motor responses opposing the mismatch between the hand and the visual cursor. Interestingly, these visual reflexes can be inhibited by the central nervous system in carefully designed environments (Franklin and Wolpert 2008). Therefore, could the choice of a strategy, e.g., gradual adaptation of planned movement or switching between distinct planed movements, be affected by the type of visual environment provided? To address this question, we designed an experiment in which two groups of subjects performed reaching movements in a visual environment with a task-irrelevant deformation, where one group was previously trained in another visual environment producing a task-relevant deformation. We analyzed the resulting behavior and adaptation. The results demonstrate that the task-relevant errors affect the subjects' learning strategy, yielding different learning behaviors.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Engineering
Publisher:	American Physiological Society
ISSN:	0022-3077
Date of Acceptance:	24 November 2014
Last Modified:	26 Nov 2024 13:30
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/173838

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