Motor skill learning decreases movement variability and increases planning horizon
Abstract
We investigated motor skill learning using a path tracking task, where human subjects had to track various curved paths at a constant speed while maintaining the cursor within the path width. Subjects' accuracy increased with practice, even when tracking novel untrained paths. Using a "searchlight" paradigm, where only a short segment of the path ahead of the cursor was shown, we found that subjects with a higher tracking skill differed from the novice subjects in two respects. First, they had lower movement variability, in agreement with previous findings. Second, they took a longer section of the future path into account when performing the task, i.e., had a longer planning horizon. We estimate that between one-third and one-half of the performance increase in the expert group was due to the longer planning horizon. An optimal control model with a fixed horizon (receding horizon control) that increases with tracking skill quantitatively captured the subjects' movement behavior. These findings demonstrate that human subjects not only increase their motor acuity but also their planning horizon when acquiring a motor skill.
Additional Information
© 2021 American Physiological Society. Received 4 November 2020; Accepted 17 February 2022; Published online 4 April 2022; Published in print 1 April 2022. The study was in parts supported by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) Grant 01GQ0830 to BFNT Freiburg-Tübingen. The authors acknowledge support by the state of Baden-Württemberg through bwHPC and the German Research Foundation (DFG) through Grant No. INST 39/963-1 FUGG. The authors also thank the "Struktur- und Innovationsfonds Baden-Württemberg (SI-BW)" of the state of Baden-Württemberg for funding. Data Availability: All analysis code is available at https://github.com/dkobak/path-tracking. Author Contributions: L.B., D.K., J.D., and C.M. conceived and designed research; L.B., D.K., and C.M. performed experiments; L.B., D.K., and C.M. analyzed data; L.B., D.K., J.D., and C.M. interpreted results of experiments; L.B., D.K., and C.M. prepared figures; L.B., D.K., and C.M. drafted manuscript; L.B., D.K., J.D., and C.M. edited and revised manuscript; L.B., D.K., J.D., and C.M. approved final version of manuscript. No conflicts of interest, financial or otherwise, are declared by the authors.Attached Files
Submitted - 505198v2.full.pdf
Supplemental Material - jn-00631-2020r01.png
Files
Name | Size | Download all |
---|---|---|
md5:7a85c29fa790877ba5ab78ce340ff5d0
|
1.8 MB | Preview Download |
md5:a232892118004bd9781d02efd9ab849c
|
118.9 kB | Preview Download |
Additional details
- Alternative title
- Motor skill learning decreases motor variability and increases planning horizon
- Eprint ID
- 106468
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20201105-160425863
- 01GQ0830
- Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (BMBF)
- State of Baden-Württemberg
- 39/963-1
- Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG)
- Created
-
2020-11-06Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
-
2022-04-06Created from EPrint's last_modified field