OBJECTIVE To evaluate the effect of age-related cognitive changes in a visuomotor learning task that depends on strategic control and contrast it with the effect in a task principally depending on visuomotor recalibration. METHODS Participants performed a ball throwing task while donning either a reversing dove prism or a displacement wedge prism, which mainly depend on strategic control or v...

We recently showed that visuomotor adaptation acquired under attentional distraction is better recalled under a similar level of distraction compared to no distraction. This paradoxical effect suggests that attentional state (e.g., divided or undivided) is encoded as an internal context during visuomotor learning, and should be reinstated for successful recall (Song & Bédard, in press). To inve...

We have recently demonstrated that visuospatial working memory performance predicts the rate of motor skill learning, particularly during the early phase of visuomotor adaptation. Here, we follow up these correlational findings with direct manipulations of working memory resources to determine the impact on visuomotor adaptation, a form of motor learning. We conducted two separate experiments. ...

When a visually guided reaching movement is unexpectedly perturbed, it is implicitly corrected in two ways: immediately after the perturbation by feedback control (online correction) and in the next movement by adjusting feedforward motor commands (offline correction or motor adaptation). Although recent studies have revealed a close relationship between feedback and feedforward controls, the n...

After neonatal damage to the midbrain tectum, hamsters exhibit as adults substantially reorganized retinal projections to the thalamus and midbrain. These experiments investigated the pattern of acquisition of a range of visuomotor capacities in hamsters with neonatal tectal damage, and the role of visual experience in this acquisition, by examining the time course of visuomotor development and...

Our capacity to learn multiple dynamic and visuomotor tasks is limited by the time between the presentations of the tasks. When subjects are required to adapt to equal and opposite position-dependent visuomotor rotations (Krakauer et al., 1999) or velocity-dependent force fields (Brashers-Krug et al., 1996) in quick succession, interference occurs that prevents the first task from being consoli...

Sensorimotor learning has been shown to depend on both prior expectations and sensory evidence in a way that is consistent with Bayesian integration. Thus, prior beliefs play a key role during the learning process, especially when only ambiguous sensory information is available. Here we develop a novel technique to estimate the covariance structure of the prior over visuomotor transformations--...

A long history of behavioral and physiological research has suggested that bilateral coordination invokes unique neural processes that are not involved in unilateral movements. This hypothesis predicts that motor learning should show limited transfer between unilateral and bilateral conditions, which is consistent with a recent finding that indicated partial, but not complete, transfer of learn...

BACKGROUND There has been little consensus as to whether age-related visuomotor adaptation effects are readily observable. Some studies have found slower adaptation, and/or reduced overall levels. In contrast, other methodologically similar studies have found no such evidence of aging effects on visuomotor adaptation. A crucial early step in successful adaptation is the ability to perform the n...

Adaptation to a novel visuomotor transformation has revealed important principles regarding learning and memory. Computational and behavioral studies have suggested that acquisition and retention of a new visuomotor transformation are distinct processes. However, this dissociation has never been clearly shown. Here, participants made fast reaching movements while unexpectedly a 30-degree visuom...