Comparison of Neurosensorimotor Adaptation Under Kinematic and Dynamic Distortions

Abstract

A pilot study was conducted to examine sensorimotor adaptations in healthy subjects to visual and dynamic distortions applied by an InMotion2 robot during a series of center-out hand movement tasks. It was discovered that changing distortion type does not differentially affect initial direction error significantly. This suggests that kinematic and dynamic distortion have similar effect on early visuomotor transformations for movement uncorrected by visual feedback. Kinematic distortion affects movement length considerably more than dynamic distortion at only the early stage of learning. No statistically significant interactions were found that were due to learning from previous exposure, however, the tests did indicate learning during each experiment evident in the time course of metrics. The data gathered in this study will also serve as a controls for a clinical trial on subjects with Parkinson's Disease.