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Competition between movement plans increases motor variability: evidence of a shared resource for movement planning.

Accepted version
Peer-reviewed

Type

Article

Change log

Authors

Oostwoud Wijdenes, Leonie  ORCID logo  https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7264-7853
Ivry, Richard B 

Abstract

Do movement plans, like representations in working memory, share a limited pool of resources? If so, the precision with which each individual movement plan is specified should decrease as the total number of movement plans increases. To explore this, human participants made speeded reaching movements toward visual targets. We examined if preparing one movement resulted in less variability than preparing two movements. The number of planned movements was manipulated in a delayed response cueing procedure that limited planning to a single target (experiment 1) or hand (experiment 2) or required planning of movements toward two targets (or with two hands). For both experiments, initial movement direction variability was higher in the two-plan condition than in the one-plan condition, demonstrating a cost associated with planning multiple movements, consistent with the limited resource hypothesis. In experiment 3, we showed that the advantage in initial variability of preparing a single movement was present only when the trajectory could be fully specified. This indicates that the difference in variability between one and two plans reflects the specification of full motor plans, not a general preparedness to move. The precision cost related to concurrent plans represents a novel constraint on motor preparation, indicating that multiple movements cannot be planned independently, even if they involve different limbs.

Description

Keywords

action, motor control, movement planning, parallel encoding, reaching, Adult, Analysis of Variance, Anticipation, Psychological, Cues, Feedback, Psychological, Female, Hand, Humans, Male, Memory, Short-Term, Middle Aged, Psychomotor Performance, Reaction Time, Visual Perception, Young Adult

Journal Title

J Neurophysiol

Conference Name

Journal ISSN

0022-3077
1522-1598

Volume Title

Publisher

American Physiological Society
Sponsorship
Wellcome Trust (106926/Z/15/Z)
This research was supported by the Wellcome Trust and the Van Coeverden Adriani Stichting.