Implicit recalibration and strategic compensation In learned and de novo motor skills

Abstract

The mechanisms underlying motor skill learning are at once well established and fiercely debated. Implicit recalibration, the process by which a motor skill is adjusted to account for unexpected feedback, has received the most attention. In fact, the processes underlying implicit recalibration was considered to account for most of skill learning. However, recent advances have shown a second process which plays a strong role in adapting an established skill, strategic compensation. It seems obvious that a strategy would be developed for dealing with unexpected perturbations to skill. However, when strategies are used, what influences their shape, and how they interact implicit recalibration is relatively unknown. We explore these adaptive processes in Chapters II – IV.

While adaptation of a learned skill has preoccupied much of the motor learning literature, and indeed much of this dissertation, how we learn new is skills equally important. Termed de novo learning, the acquisition of new action-outcome mappings is essential for common skills, such as typing on a keyboard, or playing a musical instrument. In Chapter V, we describe a new paradigm for investigating de novo learning, and provide evidence that reinforcement learning is a useful model for understanding skill learning.