Training compliance control yields improvements in drawing as a function of beery scores

Many children have difficulty producing movements well enough to improve in sensori-motor learning. Previously, we developed a training method that supports active movement generation to allow improvement at a 3D tracing task requiring good compliance control. Here, we tested 7–8 year old children from several 2nd grade classrooms to determine whether 3D tracing performance could be predicted using the Beery VMI. We also examined whether 3D tracing training lead to improvements in drawing. Baseline testing included Beery, a drawing task on a tablet computer, and 3D tracing. We found that baseline performance in 3D tracing and drawing co-varied with the visual perception (VP) component of the Beery. Differences in 3D tracing between children scoring low versus high on the Beery VP replicated differences previously found between children with and without motor impairments, as did post-training performance that eliminated these differences. Drawing improved as a result of training in the 3D tracing task. The training method improved drawing and reduced differences predicted by Beery scores

Individual differences in motor planning during a multi-segment object manipulation task

Seegelke C, Hughes C, Schütz C, Schack T. Individual differences in motor planning during a multi-segment object manipulation task. Experimental Brain Research. 2012;222(1-2):125-136.Research has demonstrated that people will adopt initially awkward grasps if they afford more comfortable postures at the end of the movement. This end-state comfort effect provides evidence that humans represent future posture states and select appropriate grasps in anticipation of these postures. The purpose of the study was to examine to what extent the final action goal of a task influences motor planning of preceding segments, and whether grasp postures are planned to optimize end-state comfort during a three-segment action sequence in which two objects are manipulated, and participants can select from a continuous range of possible grasp postures. In the current experiment, participants opened a drawer, grasped an object from inside the drawer, and placed it on a table in one of the three target orientations (0A degrees, 90A degrees, or 180A degrees object rotation required). Grasp postures during the initial movement segment (drawer opening) were not influenced by the final action goal (i.e., required target orientation). In contrast, both the intermediate (i.e., object grasping) and the final movement segment (i.e., object placing) were influenced by target orientation. In addition, participants adopted different strategies to achieve the action goal when the object required 180A degrees rotation, with 42 % of participants prioritizing intermediate-state comfort and 58 % prioritizing end-state comfort. The results indicate that individuals optimize task performance by selecting lower level constraints that allow for successful completion of the action goal and that the selection of these constraints is dependent upon contextual, environmental, and internal influences

Music, clicks, and their imaginations favor differently the event-based timing component for rhythmic movements

The involvement or noninvolment of a clock-like neural process, an effector- independent representation of the time intervals to produce, is described as the essential difference between event-based and emergent timing. In a previous work (Bravi et al. 2014a) we studied repetitive isochronous wrist's flexion-extensions (IWFEs), performed while minimizing visual and tactile information, to clarify whether non-temporal and temporal characteristics of paced auditory stimuli affect the precision and accuracy of the rhythmic motor performance. Here, with the inclusion of new recordings, we expand the examination of the dataset described in our previous study to investigate whether simple and complex paced auditory stimuli (clicks and music) and their imaginations influence in a different way the timing mechanisms for repetitive IWFEs. Sets of IWFEs were analyzed by the windowed (lag one) autocorrelation - wγ(1) -, a statistical method recently introduced for the distinction between event-based and emergent timing. Our findings provide evidence that paced auditory information and its imagination favor the engagement of a clock-like neural process, and specifically that music, unlike clicks, lacks the power to elicit event-based timing, not counteracting the natural shift of wγ(1) toward positive values as frequency of movements increase

A Szegedi Regionális Hulladéklerakó hulladékgazdálkodásának bemutatása

In order to reliably produce intelligible speech or fluently play a melody on a piano, learning the precise timing of muscle activations is essential. Surprisingly, the fundamental question of how memories of complex temporal dynamics of movement are stored across the brain is still unresolved. This review outlines the constraints that determine whether and how the timing of skilled movements is represented in the central nervous system and introduces different computational and neural mechanisms that can be harnessed for temporal encoding. It concludes by proposing a schematic model of how these different mechanisms may complement and interact with each other in fast feedback loops to achieve skilled motor timing