Overview
- A peer-reviewed Journal of Neuroscience study led by Kahori Kita tested switching across visuomotor mappings in 35 human volunteers.
- Participants showed increased errors on trials immediately after instructed switches between an intuitive mapping and a newly learned mapping.
- Similar mistakes occurred in both switch directions, pointing to systematic carryover from the pre-switch policy rather than failure to implement the new one.
- A cohort trained on two novel mappings found switching especially difficult at first, then improved with practice over several days.
- The researchers plan follow-up studies on how newly learned motor memories are stored and retrieved to enable more flexible control.