To successfully perform movements, we continuously need to adapt our movements to any changes that occur in the body (such as muscle fatigue) or in the environment (such as a strong wind affecting your frisbee throw). In the lab, we can investigate how people adapt to such changes by imposing a perturbation during a task.
In this research project, we combine data of three experiments in which people adapt to a rotation of the visual feedback of the hand, shown as a cursor, while hitting visual targets on a computer screen by sliding a pen across a drawing tablet (a visuomotor rotation task). Previous research has shown that two parallel processes drive motor adaptation: an implicit (unaware) process that causes gradual changes in our movements over time in response to a change, and a strategic (aware) that causes us to make fast changes in our movement to compensate for the change. An example of a strategy is to aim your movement next to the target, rather than straight at the target, to compensate for a change such as wind or visuomotor rotation.
Individuals show large differences in motor performance, and in how strategic they are. The goal of this project is to study the time course of the implicit and strategic processes during consolidation (adpatation to the perturbation) and 'washout' of motor memory (de-adaptation after the perturbation has been turned off again) and the relation with motor performance (hitting targets).
Following pre-processing of the data, I first divided participants in three groups based on their 'strategicness', using k-means clustering (see VMRwashout-clustering.ipynb).
Further analyses are ongoing.