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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Jul 6, 2026

Assessing Corticospinal Excitability During Goal-Directed Reaching Behavior

Assessing Corticospinal Excitability During Goal-Directed Reaching Behavior

Published on: December 2, 2022

Motor adaptation as a process of reoptimization.

Jun Izawa¹, Tushar Rane, Opher Donchin

¹Laboratory for Computational Motor Control, Department of Biomedical Engineering, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Baltimore, Maryland 21205, USA. jizawa@jhu.edu

The Journal of Neuroscience : the Official Journal of the Society for Neuroscience

|March 14, 2008

Summary

Motor adaptation aims to maximize performance in new environments, not just cancel perturbations. The nervous system reoptimizes movement plans by learning internal models and optimizing rewards for better control.

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Area of Science:

Motor control
Neuroscience
Robotics

Background:

Adaptation is often seen as canceling novel environmental effects.
An alternative perspective suggests adaptation maximizes performance.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate whether motor adaptation aims to cancel perturbations or reoptimize movement for performance.
To explore how the nervous system adapts to deterministic and stochastic environments.

Main Methods:

Theoretical prediction of optimal movement trajectories under different environmental conditions.
Observational analysis of human adaptation tendencies in novel environments.

Main Results:

Human adaptation aligns with reoptimization predictions, not perturbation cancellation.
Observed overcompensation in deterministic environments and adjusted strategies in stochastic ones.
Peak velocities increased in zero-mean stochastic environments; segmented movements appeared in via-point tasks.

Conclusions:

Motor control adaptation in novel environments is a reoptimization process.
The nervous system learns internal models to predict sensory consequences.
Movement plans are refined through reward-based optimization to minimize costs and maximize rewards.