Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Delaware, United States.
Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of Delaware, United States.
Neuroscience. 2024 Mar 5;540:12-26. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroscience.2024.01.004. Epub 2024 Jan 12.
When a musician practices a new song, hitting a correct note sounds pleasant while striking an incorrect note sounds unpleasant. Such reward and punishment feedback has been shown to differentially influence the ability to learn a new motor skill. Recent work has suggested that punishment leads to greater movement variability, which causes greater exploration and faster learning. To further test this idea, we collected 102 participants over two experiments. Unlike previous work, in Experiment 1 we found that punishment did not lead to faster learning compared to reward (n = 68), but did lead to a greater extent of learning. Surprisingly, we also found evidence to suggest that punishment led to less movement variability, which was related to the extent of learning. We then designed a second experiment that did not involve adaptation, allowing us to further isolate the influence of punishment feedback on movement variability. In Experiment 2, we again found that punishment led to significantly less movement variability compared to reward (n = 34). Collectively our results suggest that punishment feedback leads to less movement variability. Future work should investigate whether punishment feedback leads to a greater knowledge of movement variability and or increases the sensitivity of updating motor actions.
当音乐家练习一首新歌时，弹出正确的音符听起来悦耳，而弹出错误的音符则听起来刺耳。这种奖励和惩罚反馈已被证明可以不同程度地影响学习新运动技能的能力。最近的研究表明，惩罚会导致更大的运动变化，从而促进更广泛的探索和更快的学习。为了进一步验证这一观点，我们在两个实验中收集了 102 名参与者的数据。与之前的研究不同，在实验 1 中，我们发现与奖励相比，惩罚并没有导致更快的学习（n=68），但确实导致了更大程度的学习。令人惊讶的是，我们还发现了一些证据表明，惩罚会导致运动变化更小，这与学习程度有关。然后，我们设计了第二个不涉及适应的实验，从而可以进一步分离惩罚反馈对运动变化的影响。在实验 2 中，我们再次发现与奖励相比，惩罚会导致运动变化显著减少（n=34）。总的来说，我们的结果表明，惩罚反馈会导致运动变化更小。未来的研究应该调查惩罚反馈是否会导致对运动变化的更多了解，或者是否会增加更新运动动作的敏感性。
