Abstract
Visual feedback in general, and from the body in particular, is known to influence the performance of motor skills in humans. However, it is unclear how the acquisition of motor skills depends on specific visual feedback parameters such as the size of performing effector. Here, 21 healthy subjects physically trained to perform sequences of finger movements with their right hand. Through the use of 3D Virtual Reality devices, visual feedback during training consisted of virtual hands presented on the screen, tracking subject’s hand movements in real time. Importantly, the setup allowed us to manipulate the size of the displayed virtual hands across experimental conditions. We found that performance gains increase with the size of virtual hands. In contrast, when subjects trained by mere observation (i.e., in the absence of physical movement), manipulating the size of the virtual hand did not significantly affect subsequent performance gains. These results demonstrate that when it comes to short-term motor skill learning, the size of visual feedback matters. Furthermore, these results suggest that highest performance gains in individual subjects are achieved when the size of the virtual hand matches their real hand size. These results may have implications for optimizing motor training schemes.
Highlights
Vision is an important source of information that plays a significant role in action performance and learning [1, 2]
The maximal angle of each finger during training was not significantly different from the maximal angle during the intervening rest periods. This was true for all fingers in all subjects supporting the view that the fingers of the subjects in the OBS group during training were immobile. These results suggest that the visual size of the hand influences subsequent performance gains when it is presented in the context of visual feedback, but not in the context of visual input that is not controlled by the subject
Visual information is a fundamental factor in motor behavior, and many studies have considered the effects of visual information on motor skill acquisition [8, 12, 28,29,30], even without concurrent physical movement [9, 11]
Summary
Vision is an important source of information that plays a significant role in action performance and learning [1, 2]. It has been shown that performance on various reaching tasks is lower in the absence of visual feedback [3,4,5]. In the context of learning a motor task, visual input is sufficient to introduce significant performance gains even in the absence of overt movement (i.e. training by observation; [9,10,11]). When addressing the role of vision, it is important to distinguish between visual input and visual feedback. While the former is independent of the subject’s behavior, the latter is a direct consequence of the subject’s actions. Augmented feedback on the other hand relates to feedback from an external source which is based on self-generated actions
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