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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Mar 17, 2026

Visualizing Visual Adaptation

Visualizing Visual Adaptation

Published on: April 24, 2017

Temporally stable adaptation is robust, incomplete and specific.

Katinka van der Kooij¹, Krista E Overvliet^2,3, Jeroen B J Smeets²

¹Department of Human Movement Sciences, Vrije Universiteit, van der Boechorststraat 9, 1081 BT, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. k.vander.kooij@vu.nl.

The European Journal of Neuroscience

|July 30, 2016

Summary

Motor adaptation improves over multiple sessions but remains incomplete. Despite robust retention across days, sensorimotor learning plateaus before fully correcting movement errors, showing high specificity.

Keywords:

retention sensory realignment training visuomotor adaptation

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Area of Science:

Neuroscience
Motor Control
Human Movement Science

Background:

Sensorimotor adaptation, crucial for refining movements using sensory feedback, is typically studied in short sessions.
Short-term studies show adaptation plateaus before complete error correction, but longer-term dynamics and retention remain less understood.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate the long-term evolution and characteristics of sensorimotor adaptation over multiple days.
To assess the robustness, retention, and context specificity of motor adaptation.

Main Methods:

Participants engaged in a three-dimensional reaching task across six daily sessions with rotated visual feedback.
Inter-limb transfer and transfer to perceptual tasks (visual, proprioceptive) were measured to assess adaptation specificity.

Main Results:

Motor adaptation demonstrated high retention, with near-complete recall from the second session onwards.
Despite extensive practice, adaptation consistently plateaued before eliminating all movement errors.
Adaptation showed significant specificity, with minimal transfer to the untrained limb or visual perception, and only marginal transfer to proprioception.

Conclusions:

Motor adaptation is a robust process with strong long-term retention.
Adaptation is incomplete, with learning plateaus occurring before full error correction.
The learned motor adaptation is context-specific, demonstrating limited transfer across limbs and sensory modalities.