Influence of visual feedback persistence on visuo-motor skill improvement

• Published in: Scientific reports Vol. 11; no. 1; pp. 17347 - 10
• Main Authors: Unell, Alyssa, Eisenstat, Zachary M., Braun, Ainsley, Gandhi, Abhinav, Gilad-Gutnick, Sharon, Ben-Ami, Shlomit, Sinha, Pawan
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London Nature Publishing Group UK 30.08.2021; Nature Publishing Group; Nature Portfolio
• Subjects: 631/378; 631/378/2613; 631/378/2629; 631/378/2632; Accuracy; Adult; Biomechanical Phenomena; Child; Feedback; Feedback, Sensory; Female; Humanities and Social Sciences; Humans; Learning; Male; Motor ability; Motor skill; Motor skill learning; Motor Skills - physiology; Motor task performance; Movement; multidisciplinary; Psychomotor Performance; Reproducibility of Results; Science; Science (multidisciplinary); Skills; Training; Vision, Ocular; Visual perception; Young Adult
• ISSN: 2045-2322; 2045-2322
• DOI: 10.1038/s41598-021-96876-6

Towards the larger goal of understanding factors relevant for improving visuo-motor control, we investigated the role of visual feedback for modulating the effectiveness of a simple hand-eye training protocol. The regimen comprised a series of curve tracing tasks undertaken over a period of one week by neurologically healthy individuals with their non-dominant hands. Our three subject groups differed in the training they experienced: those who received ‘Persistent’ visual-feedback by seeing their hand and trace evolve in real-time superimposed upon the reference patterns, those who received ‘Non-Persistent’ visual-feedback seeing their hand movement but not the emerging trace, and a ‘Control’ group that underwent no training. Improvements in performance were evaluated along two dimensions—accuracy and steadiness, to assess visuo-motor and motor skills, respectively. We found that persistent feedback leads to a significantly greater improvement in accuracy than non-persistent feedback. Steadiness, on the other hand, benefits from training irrespective of the persistence of feedback. Our results not only demonstrate the feasibility of rapid visuo-motor learning in adulthood, but more specifically, the influence of visual veridicality and a critical role for dynamically emergent visual information.