How does practice with a reversed mouse influence subsequent speeded aiming performance? A test of global inhibition

Abstract

In a speeded aiming task, participants were trained to move a cursor with a mouse from a start position to target locations when the mouse–cursor relationships were either normal or reversed (vertically, horizontally, or both vertically and horizontally). Testing, which occurred after a 5-min delay, involved either the same or a different reversal condition. Response times improved across training, but no transfer occurred when reversal conditions were changed between training and testing. Specificity of training effects extended even to performance with the highly familiar normal mouse. Normal mouse use was slowed by a factor of two to three with training on a reversed mouse although the effect was transient in that case. To contend with a reversed mouse, participants apparently adopt a global inhibition strategy, suppressing all normal movements (and replacing them with sensorimotor remapped movements) but disinhibiting movements along any nonreversed dimension (selectively disengaging the sensorimotor remapping).

Keywords:

• Training
• Specificity
• Global inhibition
• Speeded aiming

Acknowledgements

This research was supported in part by Army Research Institute Contract DASW01-03-K-0002 and Army Research Office Grant W911NF-05-1-0153 to the University of Colorado. We are grateful to Martina Rieger, Howard Zelaznik, and Addie Johnson for helpful comments about this research.

Notes

¹Because there were effects of training with a reprogrammed mouse on subsequent testing with a normal mouse in the present experiment, we compared these effects to those in the comparable previous experiment (Healy et al., 2006, Exp. 1). The present experiment differed in design from the earlier experiment only in the delay between training and testing, which was 1 week previously and only 5 min. in the present case. As mentioned in the introduction, this delay is crucial because during the long retention interval participants were likely to have used a normal mouse during their everyday activities outside the laboratory. We conducted the same set of initial analyses on ITs and MTs from the previous experiment. None of these analyses yielded a significant main effect of training condition. For the analysis involving the first subblock of testing, there was only a small, nonsignificant advantage on testing with the normal mouse for training with the normal mouse relative to training with a reprogrammed mouse (see Figure 7), F(3, 16)<1 for IT and MT. We then compared the first subblock of testing in the two experiments to see whether the effect of delay on ITs and MTs was significant. This analysis yielded a significant interaction of experiment and training condition, IT: F(3, 32)=2.95, MSE=0.015, p=.048; MT: F(3, 32)=3.76, MSE=0.031, p=.020, probably due to intervening use of a normal mouse outside the laboratory.