Intermittent Visual Feedback Can Boost Motor Learning of Rhythmic Movements: Evidence for Error Feedback Beyond Cycles

Movement error is a driving force behind motor learning. For motor learning with discrete movements, such as point-to-point reaching, it is believed that the brain uses error information of the immediately preceding movement only. However, in the case of continuous and repetitive movements (i.e., rhythmic movements), there is a ceaseless inflow of performance information. Thus, an accurate temporal association of the motor commands with the resultant movement errors is not necessarily guaranteed. We investigated how the brain overcomes this challenging situation. Human participants adapted rhythmic movements between two targets to visuomotor rotations, the amplitudes of which changed randomly from cycle to cycle (the duration of one cycle was similar to 400 ms). A system identification technique revealed that the motor adaptation was affected not just by the preceding movement error, but also by a history of errors from the previous cycles. Error information obtained from more than one previous cycle tended to increase, rather than decrease, movement error. This result led to a counterintuitive prediction: providing visual error feedback for only a fraction of cycles should enhance visuomotor adaptation. As predicted, we observed that motor adaptation to a constant visual rotation (30 degrees) was significantly enhanced by providing visual feedback once every fourth or fifth cycle rather than for every cycle. These results suggest that the brain requires a specific processing time to modify the motor command, based on the error information, and so is unable to deal appropriately with the overwhelming flow of error information generated during rhythmic movements.