The Functional Role of Cognitive Frameworks on Visuomotor Adaptation Performance

ABSTRACT

The authors investigated the effects of cognitive representations of movement directions on sensorimotor adaptation performance. Adaptation performance was measured via a pointing experiment in which participants were provided with visual feedback that was distorted along the midsagittal plane (i.e., left-right reversal). Performance was analyzed relative to participants’ individual adaptation gains and 3 groups were subsequently defined (i.e., skilled, average, and poor adapters). The group separation was kept for the Cognitive Measurement of Represented Directions, which was used to analyze participants’ cognitive representation of movement directions. The results showed that skilled adapters, in contrast to poor adapters, possess a global representation of movement directions aligned to the cardinal axes. The cognitive representation structure hence supports the sensorimotor adaptation performance.

Keywords:

• cognitive representation
• motor learning
• movement direction
• sensorimotor adaptation

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The authors thank Tino Stöckel for his very helpful comments and suggestions on former versions of the present article.

Additional information

Funding

Heiko Lex gratefully acknowledges the financial support from Honda Research Institute Europe for the project “Cognitive planning and motor adaptation in manual action.”