Adaptation

Question 1

what is movement memory

Answer 1

• memorising past experiences
• declarative or explicit memory:
  
  • name, address etc
  • able to explicitly explain what has learned
• procedural or implicit memory
  
  • learning to ride a bicycle or play the piano
  • take place without consciously thinking about it
  • unable to express what it is we have learned
• motor skills are implicit memories

Question 2

what is force field adaptation

Answer 2

• dynamics that subjects never experienced before in normal environment
  
  • e.g. a velocity-dependent perpendicular force-field
• early adaptation
  
  • stiff arm (co-contraction) compensate perturbations in all directions
  • feedback control
• later adaptation
  
  • a predictive strategy compensates perturbation to a specific direction
  • feedforward control takes over

Question 3

what are sensory feedbacks for adaptation

Answer 3

• in learning dynamic tasks, proprioception is more important than vision
• patient who have lost proprioception have particular difficulty controlling the dynamics properties of their limbs
• directional reaching errors of patients without proprioception (i.e. only vision) suggest that patients were unable to compensate the effect of arm inertia
• patient without proprioception shows poor timing, which results in large errors

Question 4

how are internal models maintained

Answer 4

• generalisation: when a skill is learned, the brain needs to utilise it in slightly different scenarios
• retrieval: among different skills already learned, the brain needs to choose what skills to use depending on the given scenario

Question 5

what are contextual cues for motor skills

Answer 5

• contextual cue for motor learning is a piece of information that relates itself to a specific motor skill
• if we think our brain is a hard disk and skills are files, file name is the contextual cue related to that file

Question 6

what does the acquisition of a new skill lead to

Answer 6

formation of new motor memory

Question 7

what cues work in motor control

Answer 7

• cue that do not work well: state-unrelated cues
  
  • static cues (different cursor colours, background colours etc)
  • visual motions that are not related to the movement
• cues that work: state-related cues
  
  • visual feedbacks of the movement
  • proprioceptive feedbacks (different hand position etc)