Humans can acquire various motor skills through repetitive practice, eventually mastering them perfectly, and switch between skills whenever necessary. Skillful actions are characterized as automatic control and such automaticity is likely based on a visuomotor correspondence. However, the way in which visuomotor orchestration occurs in the transfer of motor learning is not fully understood. Two important factors not previously addressed in the literature are the focus of our research: Culture and aging. Of particular importance for our research group is to answer the question of how normal aging affects visuomotor learning. This issue has relevance for understanding the difficulties that older seniors experience to adapt to digital societies and to their requirements. Therefore, we have launched two connected projects:
“Effects of culture in explicit strategies for visuomotor learning””
"Learning and visuomotor skills of healthy older adults in a challenging computerized task"
To address the aims of this investigation, we collect different parameters including motor and eye-tracking data in a computerized environment that is manipulated by applying different rotational degrees. In this way, we can assess transfer effects related to culture, and aging. For the latter, learning effects linked to eye-tracking data of visuomotor learning between different effectors are studied. This approach allows us to appraise the strategies that older adults employ to perform a computerized challenging task and the nature of the learning effects as well as learning difficulties in this group.
This project is a collaboration between our research group and the laboratory of associate professor Yoshihiro Itaguchi at Keio University, Japan.
Members:
Claudia Rodríguez-Aranda (Principal investigator)
Valera Vladimirovna Johansen
Anna Johanne Jøsok Rørbakk
Financial/grant information:
NFR & Japan Society for the Promotion of Science grant (Japan-Norway researcher mobility programme)
