Resilience and motor skill learning: An exploratory fNIRS study of behavioral and prefrontal activation patterns

Psychological resilience is an individual difference factor that may relate to motor performance under challenging conditions; however, its neural correlates during motor learning remain insufficiently characterized. The present exploratory study examined whether behavioral performance and prefrontal cortical activation patterns differ as a function of trait resilience during motor skill learning. Forty-five healthy adults were classified into the high-, moderate-, and low-resilience groups based on the Korean Resilience Quotient-53 scores. Participants performed a golf putting task across the acquisition, retention, and transfer phases. Prefrontal hemodynamics were recorded using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). Behavioral outcomes included the absolute error (AE) and variable error (VE). Hemodynamic responses were indexed by changes in the oxygenated hemoglobin (HbO₂) in the prefrontal cortex. In the acquisition phase, the high-resilience group showed a lower AE at the most difficult distance (5 m) than the other groups. At the neural level, significant group differences were observed in specific prefrontal channels, with the high-resilience group showing lower HbO₂ levels in channels located within the orbitofrontal, dorsolateral, and ventrolateral prefrontal regions. During the retention phase, a channel within the frontopolar cortex showed higher HbO₂ levels in the high-resilience group. In the transfer phase, the moderate-resilience group demonstrated the most consistent performance, although no significant between-group differences in HbO₂ were found. Overall, the findings suggest that resilience may be associated with differences in motor performance and localized prefrontal engagement. However, given the limitations of the study including the channel-specific nature of the effect, these findings should be interpreted as preliminary.