Impaired visuomotor generalization by inconsistent attentional contexts

In daily life, people are constantly presented with situations in which they have to learn and acquire new motor skills in complex environments, where attention is often distracted by other events. Being able to generalize and perform the acquired motor action in different environments is a crucial part of visuomotor learning. The current study examined whether attentional distraction impairs generalization of visuomotor adaptation or whether consistent distraction can operate as an internal cue to facilitate generalization. Using a dual-task paradigm combining visuomotor rotational adaptation and an attention-demanding secondary task, we showed that switching the attentional context from training (dual-task) to generalization (single-task) reduced the range of transfer of visuomotor adaptation to untrained directions. However, when consistent distraction was present throughout training and generalization, visuomotor generalization was equivalent to without distractions at all. Furthermore, this attentional context-dependent generalization was evident even when sensory modality of distractions differed between training and generalization. Therefore, the general nature of the dual tasks, rather than the specific stimuli, is associated with visuomotor memory and serves as a critical cue for generalization. Taken together, we demonstrated that attention plays a critical role during sensorimotor adaptation in selecting and associating multisensory signals with motor memory. This finding provides insight into developing learning programs that are generalizable in complex daily environments.

NEW & NOTEWORTHY Learning novel motor actions in complex environments with attentional distraction is a critical function. Successful motor learning involves the ability to transfer the acquired skill from the trained to novel environments. Here, we demonstrate attentional distraction does not impair visuomotor adaptation. Rather, consistency in the attentional context from training to generalization modulates the degree of transfer to untrained locations. The role of attention and memory must, therefore, be incorporated into existing models of visuomotor learning.

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