Ossmy Ori, Mukamel Roy
Sagol School of Neuroscience and School of Psychological Sciences, Tel-Aviv University, Tel-Aviv, Israel.
PLoS One. 2017 Jan 5;12(1):e0168520. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0168520. eCollection 2017.
Visual feedback in general, and from the body in particular, is known to influence the performance of motor skills in humans. However, it is unclear how the acquisition of motor skills depends on specific visual feedback parameters such as the size of performing effector. Here, 21 healthy subjects physically trained to perform sequences of finger movements with their right hand. Through the use of 3D Virtual Reality devices, visual feedback during training consisted of virtual hands presented on the screen, tracking subject's hand movements in real time. Importantly, the setup allowed us to manipulate the size of the displayed virtual hands across experimental conditions. We found that performance gains increase with the size of virtual hands. In contrast, when subjects trained by mere observation (i.e., in the absence of physical movement), manipulating the size of the virtual hand did not significantly affect subsequent performance gains. These results demonstrate that when it comes to short-term motor skill learning, the size of visual feedback matters. Furthermore, these results suggest that highest performance gains in individual subjects are achieved when the size of the virtual hand matches their real hand size. These results may have implications for optimizing motor training schemes.
一般而言，视觉反馈，尤其是来自身体的视觉反馈，已知会影响人类运动技能的表现。然而，目前尚不清楚运动技能的习得如何依赖于特定的视觉反馈参数，例如执行效应器的大小。在此，21名健康受试者接受了右手手指运动序列的体能训练。通过使用3D虚拟现实设备，训练期间的视觉反馈包括屏幕上呈现的虚拟手，实时跟踪受试者的手部动作。重要的是，该设置使我们能够在不同实验条件下操纵所显示虚拟手的大小。我们发现，随着虚拟手大小的增加，表现提升也随之增加。相比之下，当受试者仅通过观察进行训练时（即，在没有身体运动的情况下），操纵虚拟手的大小对随后的表现提升没有显著影响。这些结果表明，在短期运动技能学习方面，视觉反馈的大小很重要。此外，这些结果表明，当虚拟手的大小与受试者的真实手大小匹配时，个体受试者能获得最高的表现提升。这些结果可能对优化运动训练方案具有启示意义。
