Abstract
How do people learn to perform tasks that require continuous adjustments of motor output, like riding a bicycle? People rely heavily on cognitive strategies when learning discrete movement tasks, but such time-consuming strategies are infeasible in continuous control tasks that demand rapid responses to ongoing sensory feedback. To understand how people can learn to perform such tasks without the benefit of cognitive strategies, we imposed a rotation/mirror reversal of visual feedback while participants performed a continuous tracking task. We analyzed behavior using a system identification approach, which revealed two qualitatively different components of learning: adaptation of a baseline controller and formation of a new, task-specific continuous controller. These components exhibited different signatures in the frequency domain and were differentially engaged under the rotation/mirror reversal. Our results demonstrate that people can rapidly build a new continuous controller de novo and can simultaneously deploy this process with adaptation of an existing controller.
Highlights
In many real-world motor tasks, skilled performance requires us to continuously control our actions in response to ongoing external events
New skills often require us to learn arbitrary relationships between our actions and their outcomes. Learning such mappings is thought to depend on the use of time-consuming cognitive strategies (McDougle et al, 2016), but continuous control tasks require us to produce responses rapidly, leaving little time for deliberation about our actions
Participants learned to compensate for the rotation and mirror reversal but using different learning mechanisms
Summary
In many real-world motor tasks, skilled performance requires us to continuously control our actions in response to ongoing external events. New skills often require us to learn arbitrary relationships between our actions and their outcomes (like moving our arms to steer or flexing our fingers to brake). Learning such mappings is thought to depend on the use of time-consuming cognitive strategies (McDougle et al, 2016), but continuous control tasks require us to produce responses rapidly, leaving little time for deliberation about our actions. How we are able to learn new, continuous motor skills remains unclear
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