NTT Communication Science Laboratories, 3-1 Morinosato Wakamiya, Atsugi, Kanagawa, 243-0198, Japan.
Tokyo Institute of Technology, 4259 Nagatsuta-cho, Yokohama, 226-8503, Japan.
Sci Rep. 2020 Dec 18;10(1):22342. doi: 10.1038/s41598-020-79433-5.
Humans have the ability to use a diverse range of handheld tools. Owing to its versatility, a virtual environment with haptic feedback of the force is ideally suited to investigating motor learning during tool use. However, few simulators exist to recreate the dynamic interactions during real tool use, and no study has compared the correlates of motor learning between a real and virtual tooling task. To this end, we compared two groups of participants who either learned to insert a real or virtual tool into a fixture. The trial duration, the movement speed, the force impulse after insertion and the endpoint stiffness magnitude decreased as a function of trials, but they changed at comparable rates in both environments. A ballistic insertion strategy observed in both environments suggests some interdependence when controlling motion and controlling interaction, contradicting a prominent theory of these two control modalities being independent of one another. Our results suggest that the brain learns real and virtual insertion in a comparable manner, thereby supporting the use of a virtual tooling task with haptic feedback to investigate motor learning during tool use.
人类有使用各种手持工具的能力。由于其多功能性，具有力触觉反馈的虚拟环境非常适合研究使用工具过程中的运动学习。然而，很少有模拟器可以再现实际使用工具过程中的动态交互，也没有研究比较真实和虚拟工具任务之间运动学习的相关性。为此，我们比较了两组参与者，他们要么学习将真实工具或虚拟工具插入固定装置。试验持续时间、运动速度、插入后的力冲量以及端点刚度大小随着试验次数的增加而减少，但在两种环境下，它们的变化速度相当。在两种环境中观察到的弹道插入策略表明，在控制运动和控制相互作用时存在一定的相互依赖性，这与这两种控制模式彼此独立的主流理论相矛盾。我们的研究结果表明，大脑以相似的方式学习真实和虚拟插入，从而支持使用具有力触觉反馈的虚拟工具任务来研究使用工具过程中的运动学习。
