Learning of visuomotor transformations for vectorial planning of reaching trajectories

Abstract

The planning of visually guided reaches is accomplished by independent specification of extent and direction. We investi-gated whether this separation of extent and direction planning for well practiced movements could be explained by differences in the adaptation to extent and directional errors during motor learning. We compared the time course and generalization of adaptation with two types of screen cursor transformation that altered the relationship between hand space and screen space. The first was a gain change that induced extent errors and required subjects to learn a new scaling factor. The second was a screen cursor rotation that induced directional errors and re-quired subjects to learn new reference axes. Subjects learned a new scaling factor at the same rate when training with one or multiple target distances, whereas learning new reference axes took longer and was less complete when training with multipl