Document Type
Article
Abstract
The control of reaches to targets that vary in distance involves a combination of anticipatory planning and feedback-based adjustments. However, it is not known if their contributions to the control of reach extent change with repetitive practice. This study investigated the effect of three days of practice on the control of reach extent. Right-hand dominant participants reached with either the non-dominant left arm or dominant right arm to six targets presented in two directions and three distances in a virtual environment. The effect of practice on planning and feedback-based adjustments to control reach extent was examined by determining how well peak acceleration and time to peak velocity predicted the eventual distance moved, respectively. Both arm groups demonstrated improvements in reach performance (decreased endpoint error and movement time). The Left Arm group demonstrated an increased use of anticipatory planning and feedback-based adjustments to control reach extent with practice while the Right Arm group did not show a change. Changes in the control of reach extent seen in the Left Arm group may reflect experience-dependent creation of a more robust internal model of the arm and/or increased weighting of control mechanisms from the dominant left-brain hemisphere. The potential to modify the use of anticipatory planning and feedback-based adjustments to control reach movements may be relevant for rehabilitation approaches in clinical populations such as stroke who have altered control of reach extent.
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
Publication Info
Published in Experimental Brain Research, Volume 243, Issue 236, 2025.
Rights
© The Author(s) 2025 This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
APA Citation
Schroers, F. N., Herter, T. M., Bruemmer, D., Ichiyanagi, T., Hertherington, A., O’Donnell, M., Ozorowski, J., Simmons, C., & Stewart, J. C. (2025). Effect of practice on the control of reach extent. Experimental Brain Research, 243(236).https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-025-07181-x