Perceptual-motor Task Research Articles

Sustained involvement of a frontal–parietal network for spatial response selection with practice of a spatial choice–reaction task

With practice, performance on a task typically becomes faster, more accurate, and less prone to interference from competing tasks. Some theories of this performance change suggest it reflects a qualitative reorganization of the cognitive processing required for successful task performance. Other theories suggest this change in performance reflects a more quantitative change in the amount of processing required to perform the task. Neuroimaging research results provide some support for both of these broad theories. This inconsistency may reflect the complex nature of the effect of practice on cognitive and neural processing. Our current experiment addresses this issue by investigating the effect of practice of a relatively easy perceptual–motor task on the frontal–parietal brain network for a specific cognitive process (viz. spatial response selection). Participants were scanned during three functional magnetic resonance imaging sessions on separate days within 4 days while they performed a relatively easy spatial perceptual–motor task. We found sustained activity with practice in right dorsal prefrontal cortex; and sustained but decreasing activity in bilateral dorsal premotor, left superior parietal, and precuneus cortices, supporting a quantitative decrease in difficulty of response selection with practice. Conversely, we found a qualitative change in activity with practice in left dorsal prefrontal cortex. This brain region is outside the response selection network for this task and showed activity only during novel task performance. These results suggest that practice produces both qualitative and quantitative changes in processing. The particular effect of practice depends on the cognitive process in question.

Perceptual-motor skill learning in Gilles de la Tourette syndrome: Evidence for multiple procedural learning and memory systems

Procedural learning and memory systems likely comprise several skills that are differentially affected by various illnesses of the central nervous system, suggesting their relative functional independence and reliance on differing neural circuits. Gilles de la Tourette syndrome (GTS) is a movement disorder that involves disturbances in the structure and function of the striatum and related circuitry. Recent studies suggest that patients with GTS are impaired in performance of a probabilistic classification task that putatively involves the acquisition of stimulus–response (S–R)-based habits. Assessing the learning of perceptual-motor skills and probabilistic classification in the same samples of GTS and healthy control subjects may help to determine whether these various forms of procedural (habit) learning rely on the same or differing neuroanatomical substrates and whether those substrates are differentially affected in persons with GTS. Therefore, we assessed perceptual-motor skill learning using the pursuit-rotor and mirror tracing tasks in 50 patients with GTS and 55 control subjects who had previously been compared at learning a task of probabilistic classifications. The GTS subjects did not differ from the control subjects in performance of either the pursuit rotor or mirror-tracing tasks, although they were significantly impaired in the acquisition of a probabilistic classification task. In addition, learning on the perceptual-motor tasks was not correlated with habit learning on the classification task in either the GTS or healthy control subjects. These findings suggest that the differing forms of procedural learning are dissociable both functionally and neuroanatomically. The specific deficits in the probabilistic classification form of habit learning in persons with GTS are likely to be a consequence of disturbances in specific corticostriatal circuits, but not the same circuits that subserve the perceptual-motor form of habit learning.

Perceptual learning and nonword repetition using a cochlear implant simulation

This study examined the effects of perceptual learning on nonword repetition performance of normal-hearing listeners who were exposed to severely degraded auditory conditions that were designed to simulate the auditory input of a cochlear implant. Twenty normal-hearing adult listeners completed a nonword repetition task using an eight-band, frequency-shifted cochlear implant simulation strategy both before and after training on open- and closed-set word recognition tasks. Feedback was provided during training. The nonword responses obtained from each participant were digitally recorded and played back to normal-hearing listeners. These listeners rated the nonword repetition accuracy in comparison to the original unprocessed target stimuli using a seven-point scale. The mean nonword accuracy ratings were significantly higher for the nonwords repeated after training than for nonwords repeated prior to training. These results suggest that the word recognition training tasks encouraged auditory perceptual learning that generalized to novel, nonword auditory stimuli. The present findings also suggest that adaptation and learning from the degraded auditory stimuli produced by a cochlear implant simulation can be achieved even in a difficult perceptual–motor task such as nonword repetition which involves both speech perception and production of an auditory stimulus that lacks any lexical or semantic representation.

Attention impairment in electrooculographic control of computer functions

Previous work has demonstrated that computer functions can be controlled by eye movements recorded with the use of vertical and horizontal electrooculography (EOG). In the present study, an attempt was made to show that this newly developed task could be disrupted by dual-task demands and, therefore, would follow conventional principles of multiple-task performance. Fifteen participants performed the eye movement task under two conditions—control and divided attention. It was found that the time to process letters was significantly longer in the divided attention condition than in the control condition and that males and females showed comparable performance decrements in the divided attention condition. A task that utilizes eye movements to control computer operations for syntax construction follows the same principles of limited resource allocation of attention as more conventional perceptual-motor tasks such as reaction time and manual control of computer functions.

Dynamical stability in the acquisition and performance of rhythmic ball manipulation: theoretical insights with a clinical slant.

Three experiments illustrate how a task-based approach and dynamical modeling of a perceptual-motor task can provide a useful framework for understanding functional and dysfunctional behavior. In the chosen task, subjects held a racket and bounced a ball rhythmically in the air with invariant ball amplitude. As such, the task could be cast into a mechanical model that encompassed the movements of the actor (racket) and the manipulandum (ball). In this form, the movement task is a dynamical system that displays dynamical stability, i.e., performance where perturbations die out by themselves. The hypothesis is that skilled actors seek to perform with this "passive" stability as it alleviates the control demands because perturbations do not require explicit corrections. In the experimental data, this strategy could be characterized by a single parameter, the acceleration of the racket at impact, which provided quantitative predictions. Experiment 1 established that subjects with normal sensorimotor functions indeed performed with racket acceleration values that were predicted to provide passive stability. Experiment 2 showed that subjects improved their skill over a course of 40 practice trials, as evidenced in decreased variability and accompanied by a change in racket acceleration toward values that provided optimal stability. In experiment 3, perturbations were applied and the subjects' adaptability was tested. When perturbations were large enough, subjects altered their racket timing to resume contact that provided stability. The results are discussed with their relevance to clinical contexts: How can such a task-based approach provide insights into the control of functional and dysfunctional movements? Can such behavioral results serve as a diagnostic tool? How can this approach to sensorimotor behavior stimulate physicians and therapists to progress therapeutic measures?

Two distinct pathways for developmental coordination disorder: Persistence and resolution

This article describes the perceptual motor, educational and social outcome of early motor delay in a group of 17–18 year old Finnish adolescents who were originally evaluated at age 5. The study group consisted of 65 adolescents: 22 with significant motor problems (or developmental coordination disorder, DCD), 23 with minor motor problems (intermediate group) and 20 controls. The goal of this study was to reassess the results obtained when they were age 15 and to determine whether the variables used earlier could still discriminate the adolescents at age 17. The results showed that at age 17 all perceptual motor tasks differentiated the three groups. The DCD group performed less well than the control group on all tasks, with the intermediate group situated between these two. Discriminant function analyses showed that more classification errors occurred between the control and intermediate groups at age 17 than at age 15, suggesting that the distinction between these groups becomes more difficult with age. In the educational domain, similar to the findings at age 15, the adolescents with DCD had the lowest WAIS scores and shortest school careers of the three groups. In the social domain, as found two years earlier, the DCD group had the lowest perceptions of athletic and scholastic competence while the intermediate and control groups did not differ. In addition, the interview results indicated that the three groups were in different stages of identity development. In sum, the outcome at age 17 was a replication of the results obtained at age 15 and suggests two developmental paths for those with early perceptual motor problems: ‘persistence’ and ‘catching up’.

Acquisition of expertise on a difficult perceptual-motor task by an amnesic patient.

While numerous studies have reported learning of perceptual-motor skills by amnesic patients, few if any have documented the eventual acquisition of expertise on a given task. This paper recounts the learning of the computer game Tetris by a hippocampal amnesic, whose acquisition of the task in a formal evaluation was somewhat slower than that of a comparison group, but who after many hours of self-paced practice achieved expert-level play.

Focal dystonia: Current theories

Dystonia is a syndrome characterised by abnormal involuntary sustained muscle contractions that often result in twisted and abnormal positions. Focal dystonia affects only a single body part with symptoms varying from permanent (e.g., torticollis) to task-specific (e.g., musician's cramp). The exact causes of focal dystonia have yet to be determined. Possible causative factors have been identified at all levels along the sensorimotor pathway, including anatomical constraints of the hand (musicians), abnormal co-contractions of the muscles due to reciprocal inhibition in the spinal cord, subcortical and cortical remapping, deficiencies in sensorimotor integration and perceptual deficits. A review of the current literature on these topics is provided with a special focus on musicians with focal dystonia. Also reviewed are current treatments of focal dystonia in musicians. On the basis of the currently available evidence, certain risk factors are identified for the development of task-specific focal dystonia, including number of practice hours, personality, genetic predisposition, performance factors and sensory effects. In addition, it is highlighted that dystonic movements occur predominantly in the context of perceptual-motor tasks involving emotions. When emotional and motor traces have become associated, they are difficult to change; it is suggested that this mechanism plays an important role in the preservation of dystonic symptoms.

Implicit Learning of a Perceptual-Motor Skill After Stroke

A motor skill can be learned implicitly, without awareness of what is being learned. The purpose of this study was to examine the ability of adults who had unilateral stroke to learn implicitly a perceptual-motor task. Subjects were 47 people who were poststroke and 36 control subjects. Participants performed sequences of hand movements in response to target lights in 2 conditions: a patterned sequence and a random sequence. Participants were not given explicit knowledge of the presence of the 2 conditions. Those who had stroke performed with the upper-extremity ipsilateral to the lesion. Subjects who had stroke performed more slowly than control subjects. For both groups, times decreased with practice of the patterned sequence, increased with introduction of the random sequence, and decreased again with reintroduction of the patterned sequence. Group differences persisted in a retention test given the next day of the patterned sequence, and both groups showed decreased times over the course of the retention test. People with stroke are able to learn a perceptual-motor task even without explicit instructions regarding the patterned sequence embedded in the task.

Eye Movements and the Selection of Optical Information for Catching

The direction of gaze during a single-ball throwing and catching task was analyzed to generate hypotheses regarding the optical information that participants used. Five intermediate and 5 expert jugglers threw and caught a single ball continuously with 1 hand while wearing a head-mounted eye tracker to monitor their direction of gaze. Participants were instructed to throw the ball at 3 self-paced frequencies: preferred, one half of preferred, and twice preferred. Analysis of the digital eye tracker data along with the video recording of the ball and hand revealed that all participants viewed the ball at or around the ball's zenith. Intermediates varied only the mean phase of viewing across frequencies. Experts, however, varied the initiation of viewing, the point of minimum gaze to ball distance, the mean viewing phase, and the mean time between viewing and catching across frequencies. Both groups initiated the final downward movement of the hand toward the catch 89 msec after the ball's zenith. The implications of these results for the optical information for catching and expertise in a perceptual-motor task are discussed.

Virtually perfect time sharing in dual-task performance: uncorking the central cognitive bottleneck.

A fundamental issue for psychological science concerns the extent to which people can simultaneously perform two perceptual-motor tasks. Some theorists have hypothesized that such dual-task performance is severely and persistently constrained by a central cognitive "bottle-neck," whereas others have hypothesized that skilled procedural decision making and response selection for two or more tasks can proceed at the same time under adaptive executive control. The three experiments reported here support this latter hypothesis. Their results show that after relatively modest amounts of practice, at least some participants achieve virtually perfect time sharing in the dual-task performance of basic choice reaction tasks. The results also show that observed interference between tasks can be modulated by instructions about differential task priorities and personal preferences for daring (concurrent) or cautious (successive) scheduling of tasks. Given this outcome, future research should investigate exactly when and how such sophisticated skills in dual-task performance are acquired.

The Effect of Mental Practice on Performance in a Sequential Reaction Time Task

The effect of mental practice on performance in a dot-location RT task was investigated. Participants (N = 40) were required either to mentally practice, physically practice, or do no practice on an RT task in which the signals appeared in a repeating sequence. Correct mental practice, as opposed to incorrect mental practice and no practice, was predicted to have a positive (enhancing) effect on performance of the RT task. Despite previous evidence that mental rehearsal does enhance performance in many perceptual-motor tasks, neither correct nor incorrect mental rehearsal affected subsequent sequence learning; that is, no mental practice effect was observed. That surprising result is discussed in terms of motivational, psychoneuromuscular, separate memory systems, and transfer-appropriate processing explanations of mental practice.

Effects of Uncontrollability and Failure on the Development of Learned Helplessness in Perceptual-Motor Tasks

The aim of this study was to distinguish between the roles of uncontrollability and failure on learned helplessness in a perceptual-motor task. Forty-eight junior high school students were randomly assigned in a 2 × 2 (Controllability: Contingent vs. Yoked Noncontingent Feedback x Type of Outcome: Success vs. Failure) factorial design to complete a gun-shooting task on a moving target using a computer screen. Twelve other participants (control group) simply read a passage. After filling out causal attribution and self-efficacy expectations questionnaires, all participants carried out another gun-shooting task (test task). Results showed that contingency led to higher performances than noncontingency. Success conditions elicited higher self-efficacy expectations than failure conditions. Failure entailed less persistence than success did for participants who had been assigned to the contingency condition. Internalization of failure was negatively correlated with persistence. Comparisons with the control group showed that expectations and performance deficits of learned helplessness were provoked by failure in noncontingent situations; persistence deficits were due to failure in contingent situations. These results reveal that both uncontrollability and failure can be responsible for different forms of learned helplessness.

Spectral analyses of event-related encephalographic signals

Recently, phase transitions (i.e. abrupt changes between different coordinative modes) have been used as a window into the relation between electro-magnetic activity in the brain and the performance of a perceptual-motor task. The present article reports an experiment similar to a pioneering study in this area, published in Phys. Lett. A 169 (1992) 134–144, which focused on tempo-induced transitions from syncopation to synchronization in a unimanual tapping task. In line with the original study, such transitions were found to be a consistent feature of the data and accompanying analyses of the MEG and EEG patterns revealed both in-phase and anti-phase frequency locking between the events, i.e., taps and acoustic stimuli and the corresponding brain activities. In contrast with the original study, however, no transitions were observed from the basic frequency to twice the basic frequency in the MEG and EEG recordings during synchronization. This discrepancy motivated a discussion of some potential problems in the spectral analysis of event-related encephalographic signals.

Striatal activation during acquisition of a cognitive skill.

The striatum is thought to play an essential role in the acquisition of a wide range of motor, perceptual, and cognitive skills, but neuroimaging has not yet demonstrated striatal activation during nonmotor skill learning. Functional magnetic resonance imaging was performed while participants learned probabilistic classification, a cognitive task known to rely on procedural memory early in learning and declarative memory later in learning. Multiple brain regions were active during probabilistic classification compared with a perceptual-motor control task, including bilateral frontal cortices, occipital cortex, and the right caudate nucleus in the striatum. The left hippocampus was less active bilaterally during probabilistic classification than during the control task, and the time course of this hippocampal deactivation paralleled the expected involvement of medial temporal structures based on behavioral studies of amnesic patients. Findings provide initial evidence for the role of frontostriatal systems in normal cognitive skill learning.

Contextual Dependencies during Perceptual-motor Skill Performance: Influence of Task Difficulty

The present experiment was designed to address the role of task difficulty for the development of contextual-dependent behaviour during perceptual-motor task acquisition. Task difficulty in the present study was manipulated by restricting the time that the subject; (a) viewed task-relevant information, and (b) was afforded to execute a sequence of key presses. Assuming these manipulations made the acquisition of the key press tasks more difficult, it was hypothesised that reducing the time for either of these processes would result in a greater dependence on reinstating the training context at the time of test. This was based on previous findings reported by Wright and Shea (1991) which indicated that task difficulty can contribute to the development of context-dependent behaviour. The results of the study revealed that viewing time was a potent difficulty manipulation. This is supported by the slower acquisition rates for subjects exposed to short as opposed to long viewing conditions during training. More importantly, the impact of changing the intentional-incidental stimuli relationship that was apparent during training, during the test was greatest for the individuals who experienced shorter viewing times during the training phase. Thus, the proposed influence of task difficulty on contextual-dependent performance was supported. This dependency was manifested as a slowing in both the initiation and execution of the correct key presses. It is proposed that individuals trained in the more difficult viewing condition during training, when faced with an incongruence in the acquisition and test stimuli, must engage additional data-driven verification processes to supplement their extant knowledge in order to execute an appropriate response.

Effects of Matching Cognitive and Perceptual-Motor Training to Task Components on Complex Task Performance by Older and Younger Adults

The present study investigated the type of information that should be presented during training in order to maximize the performance of older and younger adults on complex, realistic tasks. This study compares the effects of emphasizing concepts or actions during training on both immediate performance and performance after a one-month delay. Participants completed one of two tutorials for operating a computer-simulated automatic teller machine. One tutorial presented conceptual information at each system state (Concept Training). The other indicated the target object on-screen and required activation of the correct ATM simulator control (Action Training). Participants performed 20 transactions following training and 20 transactions following a one-month retention interval. Older Action trainees showed higher accuracy on perceptual-motor task components than did older Concept trainees. Older Concept trainees showed higher accuracy on cognitive task components than did older Action trainees. Younger adults showed no training group differences. Results suggest that matching type of training to task components may be especially important for older adults and that qualitatively different recommendations may result from testing older and younger adults.

Mnemonic search, but not arithmetic transformation, is associated with psychophysiological inhibition.

The possibility that mnemonic search and arithmetic transformation induce transient heart rate (HR) slowing was studied. Transient HR slowing was assumed to result from the inhibition of premature responding during information processing. Twenty young men performed a 2-step reaction time task. Two precues were followed by a choice cue: 2 additional precues and 1 final choice cue. Choice cues were varied to compare spatial and perceptual-motor processing with mnemonic or arithmetic processing. Cardiac interbeat interval and impedance cardiograph measures were taken beat by beat. The preparation for the respond cue was associated with HR slowing followed by HR speeding associated with response initiation. Mnemonic search induced a transient HR slowing before the speeding initiated by the motor response. Arithmetic transformation did not, but processing of the arithmetic series decreased cue-induced transient HR slowing. Mnemonic search may be associated with a psychophysiological inhibition analagous to that observed in perceptual-motor tasks during response selection.

Cognitive Strategies During a Reciprocal Tapping Task

The purposes of this study were: (1) to describe developmental differences in performance and cognitive strategies during a perceptual-motor task, and (2) to examine the relationships between cognitive strategies and performance. Sixty healthy children, ages 7, 9 and 11, were required to tap reciprocally with a pen between two targets. Cognitive strategies were measured by: pen marks on the paper, pen arc, and trunk movements. Cognitive strategy profiles were reported based on grade and performance level. These profiles help us to understand how children approach the task and guide the motor action. Clinical applications of the findings are described in terms of speed-accuracy tradeoff, shift from discontinuous to continuous approach to the task, use of affordances, and free(z)ing of degrees of freedom.

Intact mirror-tracing and impaired rotary-pursuit skill learning in patients with Huntington's disease: evidence for dissociable memory systems in skill learning.

Skill learning in early-stage Huntington's disease (HD) patients was compared with that of normal controls on 2 perceptual-motor tasks, rotary pursuit and mirror tracing. HD patients demonstrated a dissociation between impaired rotary-pursuit and intact mirror-tracing skill learning. These results suggest that different forms of perceptual-motor skill learning are mediated by separable neural circuits. A striatal memory system may be essential for sequence or open-loop skill learning but not for skills that involve the closed-loop learning of novel visual-response mappings. It is hypothesized that working memory deficits in HD resulting from frontostriatal damage may account broadly for intact and impaired long-term learning and memory in HD patients.