Neurobehavioural signatures of learning that emerge in a real-world motor skill task
Author(s)
Haar, Shlomi
van Assel, Camille
Faisal, Aldo
Type
Working Paper
Abstract
Summary The behavioral and neural processes of real-world motor learning remain largely unknown. We demonstrate the feasibility of real-world neuroscience, using wearables for naturalistic full-body motion tracking and mobile brain imaging, to study motor learning in billiards. We highlight the similarities between motor learning in-the-wild and classic toy-tasks in well-known features, such as multiple learning rates, and the relationship between task-related variability and motor learning. However, we found that real-world motor learning affects the whole body, changing motor control from head to toe. Moreover, with a data-driven approach, based on the relationship between variability and learning, we found the arm supination to be the task relevant joint angle. Our EEG recordings highlight groups of subjects with opposing dynamics of post-movement Beta rebound (PMBR), not resolved before in toy-tasks. The first group increased PMBR over learning while the second decreased. These opposite trends were previously reported in error-based learning and skill learning tasks respectively. Behaviorally, the PMBR decreasers better controlled task-relevant variability dynamically leading to lower variability and smaller errors in the learning plateau. We speculate that these PMBR dynamics emerge because subjects must combine multi-modal mechanisms of learning in new ways when faced with the complexity of the real-world.
Date Issued
2019-04-17
Citation
2019
Copyright Statement
© 2019 The Author(s). The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. All rights reserved. No reuse allowed without permission.
Publication Status
Published