By: Inas Essa
Learning is not only about acquiring knowledge and new information, avoiding mistakes that can cause harm is another key factor, and this works for both cognitive and motor learning. So, while a piece of information about scientific equations would guarantee you a good result in science, slipping or stumbling could help improve and prolong motor learning, according to a new study recently published in eNeuro.
The Brain's Response to Mistakes
Besides other mental functional processes, the brain works on enhancing movement in response to mistakes that could be dangerous, like slipping or stumbling, to maintain our safety. In this process, motor learning, which could be defined as a change in the capability of a person to perform a skill, as a result of practice or experience, works as the means to correct actions that lead to movement errors and remember these actions for future behavior, besides dissociating actions that help in generating desirable outcomes from those that do not.
Slipping and Better Motor LearningIn the new study, the research team investigated how experiencing a physical consequence when making a movement error affects motor learning. The team hypothesized that such experience would enhance motor learning, based on human’s basic drive for safety and seeking balance as a fundamental factor to proper movement.
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Slipping and Better Motor Learning
In the study, twenty-four participants (11 men, 13 women) divided into two groups with no known visual or neurologic disease walked down a walkway while wearing prism-goggles that distorted their visual field. They were asked to perform a precision walking task, while one group of them experienced an unexpected slip when making foot-placement errors during adaptation.
In this group, the participants slipped until they learned to adjust their steps for a balanced walk, more than the other group, which had not experienced such slip. Also, they showed faster relearning one week later in new tasks despite exposure to a competing mapping during initial learning, which means that this consequence caused greater memory consolidation.
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Learning from our Actions
Reward and punishment are known to affect motor learning dramatically; findings of the new study demonstrate that facing danger, like experiencing a slip, could boost motor learning, to help us avoid this danger again in the future and avoid such punishment of making an error. This also suggests that our motor systems are regulated to remember behaviors that promote personal safety, in addition to providing an important survival advantage.
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