"Introduction and Purpose: The movements we do to perform our day-to-day activities have always been riddled with perturbations, to which we adapt and learn. The studies looking at this aspect of motor learning should consider, the biomechanical differences that exist between individuals and create a novel task that can test every individual without any bias. This was achieved in our study by using a virtual environment to perform a novel motor skill in order to investigate how people learn to adapt to perturbations. Methods: 13 college-age participants (females = 7, Mean = 21.74 +/- 2.55) performed upper body movements to control a computer cursor. Visual rotation of the cursor position was introduced as a perturbation for one-half of the practice trials. Movement time and normalized path length were calculated. One way repeated measures ANOVA was performed to analyze significance between the performance at different times of the task. Results: Significant learning seen while learning the initial baseline task (p<0.0001) and a significant drop in performance upon immediate exposure to the perturbation (p =0.005). No significant adaptation over practice with the perturbation (p = 0.103) or significant after-effects on removal of the perturbation (p = 0.383). Conclusions: Results suggests differences in adaptation when the task is novel when compared to other adaptation studies and such novel tasks trigger a different type of learning mechanism when compared to adaptation."--Page ii.
Read
