Impaired visuomotor generalization by inconsistent attentional contexts.

Abstract

In daily life, people are constantly presented with situations in which they have to learn and acquire new motor skills in complex environments, where attention is often distracted by other events. Being able to generalize and perform the acquired motor action in different environments is a crucial part of visuomotor learning. The current study examined whether attentional distraction impairs generalization of visuomotor adaptation or whether consistent distraction can operate as an internal cue to facilitate generalization. Using a dual-task paradigm combining visuomotor rotational adaptation and an attention-demanding secondary task, we showed that switching the attentional context from tr..