Visuomotor associations facilitate movement preparation.

Abstract

Many motor skills require rapidly choosing a movement goal and preparing a movement to that goal, such as in sports where circumstances often change quickly and many actions are possible. Humans can benefit from learning the perceptual cues that predict the requirements of movement so that the choice of a movement goal and movement preparation can occur earlier. However, there remains uncertainty about how these perceptual cues are learned. Here we investigate the use and learning of these perceptual-motor associations. First, we ask if episodic memory for associations can support learning. In Experiment 1, participants first memorized associations between symbols and movement goals. When these symbols were subsequently presented as cues, reaching movements were prepared as efficiently as if the goals themselves were previewed, without the need for additional practice. Next, we ask whether statistical learning can be used to learn the associations. In Experiment 2, participants had to learn the associations during the movement task itself. This learning enabled efficient movement preparation, and the rate of improvement scaled with the number and complexity of associations. These findings suggest that movement preparation can be facilitated by perceptual cues via statistical learning and memory recall, highlighting a potential role for learning and memory systems not conventionally implicated in motor behavior. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).