Department of Bioengineering, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
J Neurophysiol. 2020 May 1;123(5):1838-1848. doi: 10.1152/jn.00509.2019. Epub 2020 Apr 1.
Little is known about the impact of attention during motor adaptation tasks on how movements adapted in one context generalize to another. We investigated this by manipulating subjects' attention to their movements while exposing them to split-belt walking (i.e., legs moving at different speeds), which is known to induce locomotor adaptation. We hypothesized that reducing subjects' attention to their movements by distracting them as they adapted their walking pattern would facilitate the generalization of recalibrated movements beyond the training environment. We reasoned that awareness of the novel split-belt condition could be used to consciously contextualize movements to that particular situation. To test this hypothesis, young adults adapted their gait on a split-belt treadmill while they observed visual information that either distracted them or made them aware of the belt's speed difference. We assessed adaptation and aftereffects of spatial and temporal gait features known to adapt and generalize differently in different environments. We found that all groups adapted similarly by reaching the same steady-state values for all gait parameters at the end of the adaptation period. In contrast, both groups with altered attention to the split-belts environment (distraction and awareness groups) generalized their movements from the treadmill to overground more than controls, who walked without altered attention. This was specifically observed in the generalization of step time (temporal gait feature), which might be less susceptible to online corrections during walking overground. These results suggest that altering attention to one's movements during sensorimotor adaptation facilitates the generalization of movement recalibration. Little is known about how attention affects the generalization of motor recalibration induced by sensorimotor adaptation paradigms. We showed that altering attention to movements on a split-belt treadmill led to greater adaptation effects in subjects walking overground. Thus our results suggest that altering patients' attention to their actions during sensorimotor adaptation protocols could lead to greater generalization of corrected movements when moving without the training device.
目前对于注意力在运动适应任务中的影响知之甚少，这种影响与运动在一个情境中的适应如何泛化到另一个情境有关。我们通过在暴露于分带行走（即双腿以不同速度移动）的过程中操纵受试者对运动的注意力来研究这一点，分带行走已知会引起运动适应。我们假设，通过在适应行走模式时分散受试者的注意力，减少他们对运动的注意力，将促进经过重新校准的运动在训练环境之外的泛化。我们推断，对新的分带条件的认识可以用于有意识地将运动置于特定环境中。为了验证这一假设，年轻人在分带跑步机上适应他们的步态，同时观察分散他们注意力或使他们意识到皮带速度差异的视觉信息。我们评估了适应和空间和时间步态特征的后效，这些特征在不同环境中以不同的方式适应和泛化。我们发现，所有组在适应期结束时都以相似的方式适应，达到了所有步态参数的相同稳态值。相比之下，注意力改变到分带环境（分心和意识组）的两组比没有改变注意力的对照组更能将运动从跑步机泛化到地面，对照组在没有改变注意力的情况下行走。这在步长时间（时间步态特征）的泛化中特别明显，这可能在地面行走时不易进行在线纠正。这些结果表明，在感觉运动适应过程中改变对运动的注意力有助于运动重新校准的泛化。目前对于注意力如何影响感觉运动适应范式引起的运动重新校准的泛化知之甚少。我们表明，在分带跑步机上改变对运动的注意力会导致在地面上行走的受试者产生更大的适应效果。因此，我们的结果表明，在感觉运动适应协议期间改变患者对自身动作的注意力，可能会导致在没有训练设备的情况下移动时，纠正运动的泛化程度更大。
