Citation

Wang TSL, Song JH. J. Neurophysiol. 2017; 118(3): 1709-1719.

Affiliation

Brown University.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2017, American Physiological Society)

DOI

10.1152/jn.00089.2017

PMID

28659458

Abstract

In daily life, people are constantly presented with situations to learn and acquire new motor skills in complex environments, where attention is often distracted by other events. Being able to generalize and perform the acquired motor action in different environments is a crucial part of visuomotor learning. The current study examined whether attentional distraction impairs generalization of visuomotor adaptation or whether consistent distraction can operate as an internal cue to facilitate generalization. Using a dual-task paradigm combining visuomotor rotational adaptation and an attention-demanding secondary task, we showed that switching the attentional context from training (dual-task) to generalization (single-task) reduced the range of transfer of visuomotor adaptation to untrained directions. However, when consistent distraction was present throughout training and generalization, visuomotor generalization was equivalent to without distractions at all. Furthermore, this attentional-context dependent generalization was evident even when sensory modality of distractions differed between training and generalization. Therefore, the general nature of the dual tasks, rather than the specific stimuli, is associated with visuomotor memory and serves as a critical cue for generalization. Taken together, we demonstrated that attention plays a critical role during sensorimotor adaptation in selecting and associating multisensory signals with motor memory. This finding provides insight into developing learning programs that are generalizable in complex daily environments.

Copyright © 2017, Journal of Neurophysiology.

Language: en

Keywords

motor control; motor learning; visual attention