A memory of errors in sensorimotor learning

How are your therapists using this knowledge to speed up your motor recovery?
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2014/08/13/science.1253138.abstract

1. David J. Herzfeld¹,*,
2. Pavan A. Vaswani²,
3. Mollie Marko¹,
4. Reza Shadmehr¹

+ Author Affiliations

1. ¹Department of Biomedical Engineering, Laboratory for Computational Motor Control, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD 21205, USA.
2. ²Department of Neuroscience, Laboratory for Computational Motor Control, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD 21205, USA.

1. ↵*Corresponding author: E-mail: dherzfe1@jhmi.edu

• Abstract

The current view of motor learning suggests that when we revisit a task, the brain recalls the motor commands it previously learned. In this view, motor memory is a memory of motor commands, acquired through trial-and-error and reinforcement. Here, we show that the brain controls how much it is willing to learn from the current error through a principled mechanism that depends on the history of past errors. This suggests that the brain stores a previously unknown form of memory, a memory of errors. A mathematical formulation of this idea provides insights into a host of puzzling experimental data, including savings and meta-learning, demonstrating that when we are better at a motor task, it is partly because the brain recognizes the errors it experienced before.