Effect of practice on the control of reach extent

TL;DR

This study explores how practice affects how people control the extent of their reaching movements, finding that practice improves performance and changes control strategies in one arm but not the other.

Contribution

The study reveals that repetitive practice increases anticipatory planning and feedback adjustments in a non-dominant arm but not in the dominant arm.

Findings

Both arm groups improved reach performance with practice, showing reduced endpoint error and movement time.

The left arm group increased use of anticipatory planning and feedback adjustments with practice, while the right arm group did not.

Changes in control mechanisms may reflect brain hemisphere involvement or internal model development.

Abstract

The control of reaches to targets that vary in distance involves a combination of anticipatory planning and feedback-based adjustments. However, it is not known if their contributions to the control of reach extent change with repetitive practice. This study investigated the effect of three days of practice on the control of reach extent. Right-hand dominant participants reached with either the non-dominant left arm or dominant right arm to six targets presented in two directions and three distances in a virtual environment. The effect of practice on planning and feedback-based adjustments to control reach extent was examined by determining how well peak acceleration and time to peak velocity predicted the eventual distance moved, respectively. Both arm groups demonstrated improvements in reach performance (decreased endpoint error and movement time). The Left Arm group demonstrated an increased use of anticipatory planning and feedback-based adjustments to control reach extent with practice while the Right Arm group did not show a change. Changes in the control of reach extent seen in the Left Arm group may reflect experience-dependent creation of a more robust internal model of the arm and/or increased weighting of control mechanisms from the dominant left-brain hemisphere. The potential to modify the use of anticipatory planning and feedback-based adjustments to control reach movements may be relevant for rehabilitation approaches in clinical populations such as stroke who have altered control of reach extent.

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s00221-025-07181-x.

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