Although much research on motor learning has focused on how we adapt our movements to maintain performance in the face of imposed perturbations, in many cases we must learn new skills from scratch, or de novo. In comparison to adaptation, relatively little is known about de novo learning. In part, this is because learning a new skill can involve many challenges, including learning to recognize new patterns of sensory input and generate new patterns of motor output. However, even with familiar sensory cues and well-practiced movements, the problem of quickly selecting the appropriate actions in response to the current state is challenging. Here, we devised a bimanual hand-to-cursor mapping which isolates this control problem. We find that participants initially struggled to control the cursor under this bimanual mapping, despite explicit knowledge of the mapping. Performance improved steadily over multiple days of practice, however. Participants exhibited no aftereffects when reverting to a veridical cursor, confirming that participants learned the new task de novo, rather than through adaptation. Corrective responses to mid-movement perturbations of the target were initially weak, but with practice, participants gradually became able to respond rapidly and robustly to these perturbations. After four days of practice, participants' behavior under the bimanual mapping almost matched performance with a veridically mapped cursor. However, there remained a small but persistent difference in performance level. Our findings illustrate the dynamics and limitations of learning a novel controller and introduce a promising paradigm for tractably investigating this aspect of motor skill learning.

中文翻译：

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在多天的练习中从头开始学习双手控制任务

尽管很多关于运动学习的研究都集中在我们如何调整我们的动作以在面对强加的扰动时保持表现，但在许多情况下，我们必须从头开始或从头学习新技能。与适应相比，人们对从头学习知之甚少。这在一定程度上是因为学习一项新技能可能涉及许多挑战，包括学习识别新的感官输入模式和产生新的运动输出模式。然而，即使有熟悉的感官提示和熟练的动作，快速选择适当的动作以响应当前状态的问题仍具有挑战性。在这里，我们设计了一个双手到光标的映射来隔离这个控制问题。我们发现参与者最初在这种双手映射下难以控制光标，尽管对映射有明确的了解。然而，经过多天的练习，表现稳步提高。当恢复到真实光标时，参与者没有表现出任何后遗症，证实参与者从头学习了新任务，而不是通过适应。对目标运动中期扰动的纠正反应最初很弱，但通过练习，参与者逐渐能够对这些扰动做出快速而有力的反应。经过四天的练习，参与者在双手映射下的行为几乎与真实映射光标的表现相匹配。但是，性能水平仍然存在微小但持续的差异。