De novo motor learning of a bimanual control task over multiple days of practice

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. Compared with 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 that 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 perturbations. After 4 days of practice, participants' behavior under the bimanual mapping almost matched performance using 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.NEW & NOTEWORTHY We examine motor learning in a novel task in which participants must use both hands to control an on-screen cursor via a nonintuitive interface. Participants gradually improved their ability to control the cursor over multiple practice sessions, but their control was worse than baseline even after 4 days. These results reveal the timescale and limitations of de novo learning-an important but understudied form of learning.