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Improving manual interception accuracy through eye and hand training

University of British Columbia

Accurate hand movements are important for many daily activities and we frequently use vision to help guide our interactions with our environment. Here we investigated whether smooth pursuit training transfers to hand movements by examining manual interception accuracy. We conducted three series of five-day perceptual-motor learning experiments. In a track-intercept task, observers were instructed to track a moving target on a screen and to hit it with their index finger as soon as it entered a “hit zone”. In each trial, only the first part (100-300 ms) of the trajectory was shown and observers had to extrapolate and intercept the target at its assumed position. In all three experiments, subjects were tested on an eye-hand coordination task on the first day (day 1, pre-test) and last day (day 5, post-test); the three experiments differed with regard to training on days 2-4. Further, subjects were invited to complete the eye-hand coordination task during a one-week follow-up session after the post-test (day 6). Experiment 1 (n=9) involved no hand movements during training; subjects only tracked the target with their eyes and received no visual feedback. Subjects in Experiment 2 (n=9) tracked and intercepted the target during training. Experiment 3 (n=9) served as a control and involved no training. Subjects in all groups were invited to come back one week after the post-test for a follow-up testing session. Results show that manual interception performance (finger position error) improves in all groups, but improves most following combined eye-hand training. Interestingly, this group also resulted in the greatest improvement in eye movements. This finding is particularly noteworthy because both training groups involved the same degree of eye-movement training, but eye movements improved only if combined with engaging the hand. Analysis of performance in the one week follow-up after the post-test revealed that training effects in the eye-hand group were particularly long-lasting and stable, whereas eye movements continued to improve through to the week follow-up. I will discuss implications of these results for our understanding of the brain pathways underlying eye and hand movement control, as well as practical applications in sports and clinical rehabilitation.

Text

2015-07-24

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 Canada

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/54148

Neuroscience

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/ca/