Citation

Franklin S, Wolpert DM, Franklin DW. J. Neurophysiol. 2012; 108(2): 467-478.

Affiliation

University of Cambridge.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2012, American Physiological Society)

DOI

10.1152/jn.01123.2011

PMID

22539828

Abstract

At an early stage of learning novel dynamics, changes in muscle activity are mainly due to corrective feedback responses. These feedback contributions to the overall motor command are gradually reduced as feedforward control is learned. The temporary increased use of feedback could arise simply from the large errors in early learning with either unaltered gains or even slightly down-regulated gains, or from an up-regulation of the feedback gains when feedforward prediction is insufficient. We therefore investigated whether the sensorimotor control system alters feedback gains during adaptation to a novel force field generated by a robotic manipulandum. To probe the feedback gains throughout learning, we measured the magnitude of involuntary rapid visuomotor responses to rapid shifts in the visual location of the hand during reaching movements. We found large increases in the magnitude of the rapid visuomotor response whenever the dynamics changed: both when the force field was first presented, and when it was removed. We confirmed that these changes in feedback gain are not simply a by-product of the change in background load, by demonstrating that this rapid visuomotor response is not load sensitive. Our results suggest that when the sensorimotor control system experiences errors, it increases the gain of the visuomotor feedback pathways to deal with the unexpected disturbances until the feedforward controller learns the appropriate dynamics. We suggest that these feedback gains are up-regulated with increased uncertainty in the knowledge of the dynamics in order to counteract any errors or disturbances and ensure accurate and skilful movements.

Language: en