Tiny visual latencies can profoundly impair implicit sensorimotor learning

Short sub-100 ms visual feedback latencies are common in many types of human-computer interactions yet are known to markedly reduce performance in a wide variety of motor tasks from simple pointing to operating surgical robotics. It remains unclear, however, whether these latencies impair not only skilled motor performance but also the implicit sensorimotor learning that underlies its acquisition. Inspired by neurophysiological findings showing that cerebellar LTD and cortical LTP would both be disrupted by sub-100 ms latencies, we hypothesized that implicit sensorimotor learning may be particularly sensitive to these short latencies. Remarkably, we find that improving latency by just 60 ms, from 85 to 25 ms in continuous-feedback experiments, increases implicit learning by 50% and proportionally decreases explicit learning. This resulted in a dramatic reorganization of sensorimotor memory from a 45/55 to a 70/30 implicit/explicit ratio. This 70/30 ratio is more than double that observed in any previous study examining the effect of latency on sensorimotor learning, including a recent study which provided time-advanced visual feedback, suggesting that the low-latency continuous visual feedback we provided is critical for efficiently driving implicit learning. We go on to show that implicit sensorimotor learning is considerably more sensitive to latencies in the sub-100 ms range than to higher latencies, in line with the latency-specific neural plasticity that has been observed. This suggests a clear benefit for latency reduction in computer-based training that involves implicit sensorimotor learning and that across-study differences in computer-based experiments that have examined implicit sensorimotor learning might be explained by differences in unmeasured feedback latencies.