Can you learn not to respond to irrelevant motion while making fast arm movements?

Area of Science:

• Motor control
• Human movement science
• Perceptual learning

Background:

• Goal-directed arm movements rapidly adjust to target displacements.
• Movements can be adjusted to intercept moving targets.
• Irrelevant motion can elicit futile motor responses.

Purpose of the Study:

• Investigate if humans can learn to ignore irrelevant motion during interception tasks.
• Determine the extent to which responses to distracting visual stimuli can be suppressed.

Main Methods:

• Participants intercepted moving targets against a background of moving dots.
• The background dots began moving at a fixed time before target interception.
• Target jumps were introduced to differentiate learning to ignore motion from general adaptation.

Main Results:

• Responses to irrelevant motion decreased over trials but were not eliminated.
• Learning was specific to reducing responses to irrelevant motion, not general new information.
• Participants demonstrated a capacity for adaptive suppression of reflexive motor responses.

Conclusions:

• Humans can learn to reduce, but not completely eliminate, responses to irrelevant motion.
• Motor systems exhibit a residual susceptibility to distracting visual cues.
• Adaptive motor control involves both learning to ignore and inherent response tendencies.