Learning to reach via corrective movements
Summary form only given. When infants begin to perform goal-directed reaching, the kinematics of their reaches show multiple accelerations and decelerations of the hand, which appear to reflect a correcting series of submovements. Although each submovement is an inaccurate correction, the sequence of submovements is often successful in reaching the target. Under some circumstances, such as when learning a novel task or when high accuracy is required, adult behavior also consists of a series of submovements that appear to be corrective in nature. We investigate the hypothesis that this reflects the action of two primary processes: one that regulates the metric properties of the submovements, and one that initiates them at the proper times and in roughly in the correct directions. We hypothesize that the cerebellum is the key structure underlying the first of these processes. The cerebellum is modeled as an adaptive, predictive controller that regulates movement by learning to react in an anticipatory fashion to sensory feedback. (1 page)