JN Fuel your research with LabChart
HOME HELP FEEDBACK SUBSCRIPTIONS ARCHIVE SEARCH
 QUICK SEARCH:   [advanced]


     


J Neurophysiol (March 19, 2008). doi:10.1152/jn.00015.2008
This Article
Right arrow Full Text (PDF)
Right arrow Alert me when this article is cited
Right arrow Alert me if a correction is posted
Services
Right arrow Email this article to a friend
Right arrow Similar articles in this journal
Right arrow Similar articles in PubMed
Right arrow Alert me to new issues of the journal
Right arrow Download to citation manager
Google Scholar
Right arrow Articles by Ethier, V.
Right arrow Articles by Shadmehr, R.
PubMed
Right arrow PubMed Citation
Right arrow Articles by Ethier, V.
Right arrow Articles by Shadmehr, R.
Submitted on January 6, 2008
Accepted on March 16, 2008

Spontaneous recovery of motor memory during saccade adaptation

Vincent Ethier1, David S Zee2, and Reza Shadmehr1*

1 Biomedical Engineering, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, United States
2 Dept. of Neurology, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, United States

* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: reza{at}bme.jhu.edu.

It is possible that motor adaptation in the timescales of minutes is supported by two distinct processes: one process that learns slowly from error but has strong retention, and another that learns rapidly from error but has poor retention. This two-state model makes the prediction that if a period of adaptation is followed by a period of reverse-adaptation, then in the subsequent period in which errors are clamped to zero (error-clamp trials) there will be a spontaneous recovery, i.e., a rebound of behavior toward the initial level of adaptation. Here we tested and confirmed this prediction during double-step, on-axis, saccade adaptation. When people adapted their saccadic gain to a magnitude other than one (adaptation) and then the gain was rapidly reversed back to one (reverse-adaptation), in the subsequent error-clamp trials (visual target placed on the fovea after the saccade) the gain reverted toward the initially adapted value and then gradually reverted toward normal. We estimated that the fast system was about 20 times more sensitive to error than the slow system, but had a time constant of 28 seconds while the slow system had a time constant of nearly 8 minutes. Therefore, short-term adaptive mechanisms that maintain accuracy of saccades rely on a memory system that has characteristics of a multi-state process with a logarithmic distribution of timescales.







HOME HELP FEEDBACK SUBSCRIPTIONS ARCHIVE SEARCH
Visit Other APS Journals Online
Copyright © 2008 by the The American Physiological Society.