THE EYES HAVE IT?
New research from the University of Florida suggests that vision may play an important role in helping people learn new motor skills.
Written by Kayt Sukel
WE ALL KNOW THAT PERSON—the one who can naturally swing a golf club, pick up the latest TikTok dance, or successfully balance in a new yoga pose with little to no effort. It would be all too easy to say that individual is gifted with extra flexibility or perhaps some unique muscular capabilities. But a new study from Daniel Ferris, a professor of biomedical engineering at the University of Florida, and his former doctoral student, Noelle Jacobsen, suggests that those who can learn new movements quickly may be gaining that advantage from the brain—particularly the visual cortex, a region of the brain responsible for vision.
“There’s a lot of variability in how fast people can pick up new motor skills or adapt to new environments,” said Jacobsen, who is now a postdoctoral researcher at Imperial College London. “Adaptation, in particular, is something we all have to do in our daily lives. Without thinking about it, most of us can walk in a new pair of shoes, cautiously move across a patch of ice, or learn to rollerblade. We were interested in trying to figure out what our brains are doing while we are doing this kind of adapting.”
To that end, Ferris and Jacobsen monitored the brain activity of study participants using high density electroencephalography (EEG) as they walked on a special treadmill with two belts moving at different speeds. The task was fairly simple: Participants just had to walk on the treadmill, finding a way to adapt their normal gait in order to manage the split belt and speeds. Unsurprisingly, just as you might see in dance class or on the pickleball court, some people could quickly adjust to this new type of walking to the order of about a minute. Others took a little longer to get the hang of it, about four times longer on average.
It took up to 2.5 hours for researchers to set up the electroencephalography (EEG) system and prepare each participant before an experiment. Photo by Noelle Jacobsen
“Everyone in the study was a neurotypical young adult. We subgrouped them by how fast they could adapt to the new way of walking and then looked at their brain activity as they did it,” Jacobsen said. “We found differences in the visual cortex, as well as posterior parietal cortex between the fast learners and slow learners.”
The visual cortex is responsible for perceiving and processing visual information from the outside world, while the posterior parietal cortex has been linked to activities like planning movements and spatial awareness. The researchers also noticed a difference in anterior cingulate cortex activity, which has been associated with error correction.
Jacobsen said the research group did not anticipate seeing differences in visual cortex—it was a bit of a surprise—and what exactly it means is up for interpretation.
“It’s clear that vision is important and certainly, there are studies to show that if you have worse visual ability, you will have worse gait stability, especially in older adults,” she said. “We know that vision is important for balance and walking stability in general so it may be that fast and slow adapters have slightly different learning strategies that use vision in different ways as they figure out how to adapt.”
“What’s really interesting is that peoples’ brains respond differently. Some people adjust quickly, while others take a bit longer, and that’s reflected in their brain activity. It just goes to show that we all learn in our own unique way.”
– Noelle Jacobsen, postdoctoral researcher, Imperial College London
But that does not necessarily mean that vision by itself is helping you learn new movements. In fact, in a previous study, Ferris and colleagues demonstrated that using strobe training glasses to briefly interrupt visual input can help people learn how to walk on a balance beam faster.
“These glasses, which temporarily block out your vision for a couple of seconds, can speed up how fast you can learn to balance and walk,” she said. “So, the visual cortex activation we see might not mean that people are using vision more. It may be that they are suppressing it and relying on other sensory information in order to learn the new skill faster.”
These studies open up some exciting new research questions into the exact role that vision plays in learning or adjusting motor skills, but also exciting possibilities for gait rehabilitation after an injury or stroke, Jacobsen said.
Close-up of a dual-electrode EEG system, showing a primary electrode that faces the scalp to measure brain signals and a secondary electrode facing outward to detect movement noise. Photo by Noelle Jacobsen
“What’s really interesting is that peoples’ brains respond differently. Some people adjust quickly, while others take a bit longer, and that’s reflected in their brain activity. It just goes to show that we all learn in our own unique way,” she said. “If we can start to understand what kind of activity patterns are normal, you can tailor treatments to strengthen those brain areas, even perhaps leading to more personalized approaches in athletic training and rehabilitation.”
Such insights could also help support the development of performance-enhancing wearable devices.
“One of the coolest things about this research is how mobile brain imaging lets us see what our brains are doing in real time during everyday activities,” Jacobsen continued. “As we learn more about what the brain is doing, exploring the different areas involved with real-world activities, we can use that information to create new types of devices that might be able to enhance athletic training or help with balance training in older adults.”
Kayt Sukel is a technology writer and author in Houston.
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