Bittmann Moria Fisher, Patton James Lanphier
IEEE Trans Neural Syst Rehabil Eng. 2017 Aug;25(8):1109-1116. doi: 10.1109/TNSRE.2016.2613443. Epub 2016 Sep 23.
Previous studies on reaching movements have shown that people can adapt to either visuomotor (e.g., prism glasses) or mechanical distortions (e.g., force fields) through repetitive practice. Recent work has shown that adaptation to one type of distortion might have implications on learning the other type, suggesting that neural resources are common to both kinematic and kinetic adaptation. This study investigated whether training with a novel force field might benefit the learning of a visual distortion-specifically, when forces were designed to produce aftereffects that aligned with the ideal trajectory for a visual rotation. Participants training with these forces (Force Group) were tested on a visual rotation. After training with this novel field, we found that participants had surprisingly good performance in the visual rotation condition, comparable to a group that trained on the visual rotation directly. A third group tested the rate of learning with intermittent catch trials, where we zeroed the forces and switched to the visual rotation, and found a significantly faster learning rate than the group that trained directly on the visual rotation. Interestingly, these abilities continued to significantly improve one day later, whereas the direct training showed no such effect. All participants were able to generalize what they learned to unpracticed movement directions. We speculate that when forces are used in training, haptic feedback can have a substantial influence on learning a task that heavily relies on visual feedback. Such methods can impact any situation where one might add robotic forces to the training process.
以往关于伸手动作的研究表明，人们可以通过重复练习来适应视觉运动（如三棱镜）或机械扭曲（如力场）。最近的研究表明，对一种类型扭曲的适应可能会对学习另一种类型产生影响，这表明神经资源对于运动学和动力学适应来说是共有的。本研究调查了使用一种新型力场进行训练是否会有助于视觉扭曲的学习——具体而言，当力被设计成产生与视觉旋转的理想轨迹一致的后效时。使用这些力进行训练的参与者（力场组）接受了视觉旋转测试。在用这个新型力场训练后，我们发现参与者在视觉旋转条件下表现出奇地好，与直接在视觉旋转上进行训练的组相当。第三组通过间歇性捕捉试验测试学习速度，即我们将力归零并切换到视觉旋转，结果发现其学习速度比直接在视觉旋转上进行训练的组明显更快。有趣的是，这些能力在一天后仍继续显著提高，而直接训练则没有这种效果。所有参与者都能够将所学内容推广到未练习过的运动方向。我们推测，当在训练中使用力时，触觉反馈会对学习一项严重依赖视觉反馈的任务产生重大影响。这种方法可以影响任何可能在训练过程中添加机器人力的情况。
