Abstract
Visual observation of movement plays a key role in action. For example, tennis players have little time to react to the ball, but still need to prepare the appropriate stroke. Therefore, it might be useful to use visual information about the ball trajectory to recall a specific motor memory. Past visual observation of movement (as well as passive and active arm movement) affects the learning and recall of motor memories. Moreover, when passive or active, these past contextual movements exhibit generalization (or tuning) across movement directions. Here we extend this work, examining whether visual motion also exhibits similar generalization across movement directions and whether such generalization functions can explain patterns of interference. Both the adaptation movement and contextual movement exhibited generalization beyond the training direction, with the visual contextual motion exhibiting much broader tuning. A second experiment demonstrated that this pattern was consistent with the results of an interference experiment where opposing force fields were associated with two separate visual movements. Overall, our study shows that visual contextual motion exhibits much broader (and shallower) tuning functions than previously seen for either passive or active movements, demonstrating that the tuning characteristics of past motion are highly dependent on their sensory modality.
Highlights
Humans adapt to changes in dynamics by developing an internal model or motor memory which can predictively compensate for the new dynamics[1,2,3]
The first experiment examined the directional tuning of both contextual visual motion and the active adaptive movements using a single curl field-learning task
In this experiment the past visual motion context is not required in order to learn the compensation (Fig. 1)
Summary
Humans adapt to changes in dynamics by developing an internal model or motor memory which can predictively compensate for the new dynamics[1,2,3]. This finding was further supported by a similar study in which the preceding contextual movement was a combination of active and visual motion[24] in contrast to purely passive movements[28] Both of these studies examined the pattern of generalization after participants learned to uniquely associate two separate contextual movements with two opposing curl force fields in an interference task. As the accuracy of both vision and proprioception vary with each other and throughout the workspace[38,39], the sensitivity of these contextual signals may vary across sensory modalities To investigate this question, here we characterized the angular tuning responses for past visual contextual movements in a set of experiments looking at adaptation to both a single force field and in an interference study. The main distinctions are that the contextual movements are visual in nature (rather than passive physical movements) and modeling of the angular tuning functions are performed using von Mises functions (rather than using Gaussian functions)
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