Citation

Herzfeld DJ, Vaswani PA, Marko M, Shadmehr R. Science 2014; 345(6202): 1349-1353.

Affiliation

Department of Biomedical Engineering, Laboratory for Computational Motor Control, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD 21205, USA.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2014, American Association for the Advancement of Science)

DOI

10.1126/science.1253138

PMID

25123484

Abstract

The current view of motor learning suggests that when we revisit a task, the brain recalls the motor commands it previously learned. In this view, motor memory is a memory of motor commands, acquired through trial-and-error and reinforcement. Here, we show that the brain controls how much it is willing to learn from the current error through a principled mechanism that depends on the history of past errors. This suggests that the brain stores a previously unknown form of memory, a memory of errors. A mathematical formulation of this idea provides insights into a host of puzzling experimental data, including savings and meta-learning, demonstrating that when we are better at a motor task, it is partly because the brain recognizes the errors it experienced before.

Language: en