How is a motor skill learned? Change and invariance at the levels of task success and trajectory control

Lior Shmuelof, John W. Krakauer, Pietro Mazzoni

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

296 Scopus citations

Abstract

The public pays large sums of money to watch skilled motor performance. Notably, however, in recent decades motor skill learning (performance improvement beyond baseline levels) has received less experimental attention than motor adaptation (return to baseline performance in the setting of an external perturbation). Motor skill can be assessed at the levels of task success and movement quality, but the link between these levels remains poorly understood. We devised a motor skill task that required visually guided curved movements of the wrist without a perturbation, and we defined skill learning at the task level as a change in the speed-accuracy trade-off function (SAF). Practice in restricted speed ranges led to a global shift of the SAF. We asked how the SAF shift maps onto changes in trajectory kinematics, to establish a link between task-level performance and fine motor control. Although there were small changes in mean trajectory, improved performance largely consisted of reduction in trial-to-trial variability and increase in movement smoothness. We found evidence for improved feedback control, which could explain the reduction in variability but does not preclude other explanations such as an increased signal-tonoise ratio in cortical representations. Interestingly, submovement structure remained learning invariant. The global generalization of the SAF across a wide range of difficulty suggests that skill for this task is represented in a temporally scalable network. We propose that motor skill acquisition can be characterized as a slow reduction in movement variability, which is distinct from faster model-based learning that reduces systematic error in adaptation paradigms.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)578-594
Number of pages17
JournalJournal of Neurophysiology
Volume108
Issue number2
DOIs
StatePublished - 15 Jul 2012
Externally publishedYes

Keywords

  • Motor control
  • Movement
  • Pointing
  • Reaching
  • Speed-accuracy trade-off
  • Wrist

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • General Neuroscience
  • Physiology

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