A software tool for at-home measurement of sensorimotor adaptation

Sensorimotor adaptation is traditionally studied in well-controlled laboratory settings with specialized equipment. However, recent public health concerns such as the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as a desire to recruit a more diverse study population, have led the motor control community to consider at-home study designs. At-home motor control experiments are still rare because of the requirement to write software that can be easily used by anyone on any platform. To this end, we developed software that runs locally on a personal computer. The software provides audiovisual instructions and measures the ability of the subject to control the cursor in the context of visuomotor perturbations. We tested the software on a group of at-home participants and asked whether the adaptation principles inferred from in-lab measurements were reproducible in the at-home setting. For example, we manipulated the perturbations to test whether there were changes in adaptation rates (savings and interference), whether adaptation was associated with multiple timescales of memory (spontaneous recovery), and whether we could selectively suppress subconscious learning (delayed feedback, perturbation variability) or explicit strategies (limited reaction time). We found remarkable similarity between in-lab and at-home behaviors across these experimental conditions. Thus, we developed a software tool that can be used by research teams with little or no programming experience to study mechanisms of adaptation in an at-home setting.