Abstract
Humans normally adapt earlier segments of multistep motor actions in such a way that the execution of later segments is facilitated. For example, the kinematics of grasping movements are adapted to the requirements of the intended subsequent object manipulations. Here we studied which factors foster adaptation of earlier action segments to later ones in a novel task for which no prior experience existed. Participants executed a two-step isometric force production task, in which the force produced in the first segment determined the difficulty of the second segment. Adaptation of the first segment to the second one benefited from explicit knowledge of the dependency between both segments but not from extensive prior experience with the second segment. These observations show that adaptation of motor actions to subsequent actions demands the construction of a task representation that allows to plan the first action segment with respect to its successor. How specifically the first segment is tailored to the second one does not depend on prior experience with the second segment but depends on experience from performing the interdependent two-step action sequence.
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Notes
18 participants did not disclose their age or it was not registered.
Six participants were excluded from this analysis because the effort has not been correctly registered during the experiment.
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Acknowledgements
We thank Georg Schüssler and Albrecht Sebald for technical support and Lorena Fleischmann for preparing and running the experiment.
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Herbort, O., Kunde, W. Emergence of anticipatory actions in a novel task. Exp Brain Res 237, 1421–1430 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-019-05516-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-019-05516-z