Interacting Adaptive Processes with Different Timescales Underlie Short-Term Motor Learning

Multiple processes may contribute to motor skill acquisition, but it is thought that many of these processes require sleep or the passage of long periods of time ranging from several hours to many days or weeks. Here we demonstrate that within a timescale of minutes, two distinct fast-acting process...

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Main Authors: Smith, Maurice A, Ghazizadeh, Ali, Shadmehr, Reza
Format: Online
Language:English
Published: Public Library of Science 2006
Online Access:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1463025/
id pubmed-1463025
recordtype oai_dc
spelling pubmed-14630252006-06-13 Interacting Adaptive Processes with Different Timescales Underlie Short-Term Motor Learning Smith, Maurice A Ghazizadeh, Ali Shadmehr, Reza Research Article Multiple processes may contribute to motor skill acquisition, but it is thought that many of these processes require sleep or the passage of long periods of time ranging from several hours to many days or weeks. Here we demonstrate that within a timescale of minutes, two distinct fast-acting processes drive motor adaptation. One process responds weakly to error but retains information well, whereas the other responds strongly but has poor retention. This two-state learning system makes the surprising prediction of spontaneous recovery (or adaptation rebound) if error feedback is clamped at zero following an adaptation-extinction training episode. We used a novel paradigm to experimentally confirm this prediction in human motor learning of reaching, and we show that the interaction between the learning processes in this simple two-state system provides a unifying explanation for several different, apparently unrelated, phenomena in motor adaptation including savings, anterograde interference, spontaneous recovery, and rapid unlearning. Our results suggest that motor adaptation depends on at least two distinct neural systems that have different sensitivity to error and retain information at different rates. Public Library of Science 2006-06 2006-05-23 /pmc/articles/PMC1463025/ /pubmed/16700627 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.0040179 Text en Copyright: © 2006 Smith et al. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited.
repository_type Open Access Journal
institution_category Foreign Institution
institution US National Center for Biotechnology Information
building NCBI PubMed
collection Online Access
language English
format Online
author Smith, Maurice A
Ghazizadeh, Ali
Shadmehr, Reza
spellingShingle Smith, Maurice A
Ghazizadeh, Ali
Shadmehr, Reza
Interacting Adaptive Processes with Different Timescales Underlie Short-Term Motor Learning
author_facet Smith, Maurice A
Ghazizadeh, Ali
Shadmehr, Reza
author_sort Smith, Maurice A
title Interacting Adaptive Processes with Different Timescales Underlie Short-Term Motor Learning
title_short Interacting Adaptive Processes with Different Timescales Underlie Short-Term Motor Learning
title_full Interacting Adaptive Processes with Different Timescales Underlie Short-Term Motor Learning
title_fullStr Interacting Adaptive Processes with Different Timescales Underlie Short-Term Motor Learning
title_full_unstemmed Interacting Adaptive Processes with Different Timescales Underlie Short-Term Motor Learning
title_sort interacting adaptive processes with different timescales underlie short-term motor learning
description Multiple processes may contribute to motor skill acquisition, but it is thought that many of these processes require sleep or the passage of long periods of time ranging from several hours to many days or weeks. Here we demonstrate that within a timescale of minutes, two distinct fast-acting processes drive motor adaptation. One process responds weakly to error but retains information well, whereas the other responds strongly but has poor retention. This two-state learning system makes the surprising prediction of spontaneous recovery (or adaptation rebound) if error feedback is clamped at zero following an adaptation-extinction training episode. We used a novel paradigm to experimentally confirm this prediction in human motor learning of reaching, and we show that the interaction between the learning processes in this simple two-state system provides a unifying explanation for several different, apparently unrelated, phenomena in motor adaptation including savings, anterograde interference, spontaneous recovery, and rapid unlearning. Our results suggest that motor adaptation depends on at least two distinct neural systems that have different sensitivity to error and retain information at different rates.
publisher Public Library of Science
publishDate 2006
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1463025/
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