Influence of visual feedback persistence on visuo-motor skill improvement

Alyssa Unell,Abhinav Gandhi,Zachary M Eisenstat,Pawan Sinha,Shlomit Ben-Ami,Ainsley Braun,Sharon Gilad-Gutnick

doi:10.1038/s41598-021-96876-6

Abstract

Towards the larger goal of understanding factors relevant for improving visuo-motor control, we investigated the role of visual feedback for modulating the effectiveness of a simple hand-eye training protocol. The regimen comprised a series of curve tracing tasks undertaken over a period of one week by neurologically healthy individuals with their non-dominant hands. Our three subject groups differed in the training they experienced: those who received ‘Persistent’ visual-feedback by seeing their hand and trace evolve in real-time superimposed upon the reference patterns, those who received ‘Non-Persistent’ visual-feedback seeing their hand movement but not the emerging trace, and a ‘Control’ group that underwent no training. Improvements in performance were evaluated along two dimensions—accuracy and steadiness, to assess visuo-motor and motor skills, respectively. We found that persistent feedback leads to a significantly greater improvement in accuracy than non-persistent feedback. Steadiness, on the other hand, benefits from training irrespective of the persistence of feedback. Our results not only demonstrate the feasibility of rapid visuo-motor learning in adulthood, but more specifically, the influence of visual veridicality and a critical role for dynamically emergent visual information.

Highlights

Towards the larger goal of understanding factors relevant for improving visuo-motor control, we investigated the role of visual feedback for modulating the effectiveness of a simple hand-eye training protocol
Studies examining the use of visual feedback in different stages of infancy[5,6,7] and leading up to adulthood[8] have generally focused on basic types of movements, overall suggesting that the human developmental progression exhibits a steady increase in the use of visual feedback for motor control
What remains largely unknown is the role of persistent visual feedback, i.e., cues that can be extracted from a visual trace of the performed movement, that can be directly compared to the target in a continuous manner

Summary

Introduction

Towards the larger goal of understanding factors relevant for improving visuo-motor control, we investigated the role of visual feedback for modulating the effectiveness of a simple hand-eye training protocol. Our capacity to perform visually guided motor actions, known as visuo-motor coordination[1], plays an important role in our ability to effectively interact with our surroundings These skills typically undergo rapid improvement during early childhood and continue to improve into adulthood. The most natural source of persistent visual feedback is the emergent trace of a produced pattern, a visual cue that is inherent to every graphic production activity, including drawing, curve tracing and handwriting. These well-trained motor production skills are the outcome of temporally coupled continuous movement with visual feedback in the form of the emerging pattern, resulting in continuous motor-visual c ongruence[19,20,21,22]. The low level of baseline proficiency with the left hand allows latitude for improvement, and eliminates the unintentional training that might occur during the training period if it were the dominant hand being tested, since it would be impractical to prevent usage over the course of multiple days

Methods

Results

Conclusion