Abstract
Visual information is critical for learning motor skills. The visual information can be split into feedback (fixations which provide motor execution results) and feedforward (fixations which plan for future actions) information. How feedback and feedforward visual information informs the motor learning process remains unknown. To investigate this question, we examined how the absence of feedback or feedforward visual information effected motor learning. Participants completed an online “video game” during which small objects traveled downward through 1 of 4 vertical channels at a constant velocity (Traveling the length of the channel in 1.3 seconds). Participants pressed the corresponding key(s) while the object(s) crossed the targets at the bottom of the vertical channels. Participants completed 8 trial blocks (practice, baseline, 5 training blocks and a post test). During each training block and the post test a fixed 10-object spatiotemporal sequence was repeated 15 times. Participants were divided into 3 groups for the training blocks: a feedback-only group had only the bottom 40% of the channel visible, a feedforward-only group had only the upper 60% of the channel visible, and a full-vision control group. We hypothesized that the feedback-only group would match the full vision group in the beginning, but plateau due to the lack of feedforward information, while the feedforward-only group would initially improve slowly, but perform similarly to the full-vision group during post testing. Preliminary results partly support our hypotheses. In the first training block, the feedback-only group did perform similarly to the full-vision group while the feedforward-only group performed worse. However, at the post test, the two limited vision groups tended to perform better than the full vision group. The preliminary results suggest that limiting visual information during training may improve motor learning, perhaps by forcing participants to maintain a narrower focus of attention.