The impact of dwell time on the contextual effect of visual and passive lead-in movements

Contextual cues arising from distinct movements are crucial in shaping control strategies for human movement. Here, we examine the impact of visual and passive lead-in movement cues on unimanual motor learning, focusing on the influence of “dwell time,” where two-part movements are separated by the interval between the end of the first movement and the start of the second. We used a robotic manipulandum to implement a point-to-point interference task with switching opposing viscous curl fields in male and female human participants. Consistent with prior research, in both visual and passive lead-in conditions, participants showed significant adaptation to opposing dynamics with short dwell times. As dwell time increased for both visual and passive signals, past movement information had less contextual influence. However, the efficacy of visual movement cues declined more rapidly as dwell times increased. At dwell times greater than 800 ms, the contextual influence of prior visual movement was small, whereas the effectiveness of passive lead-in movement was found to be significantly greater. This indicates that the effectiveness of sensory movement cues in motor learning is modality dependent. We hypothesize that such differences may arise because proprioceptive signals directly relate to arm movements, whereas visual inputs exhibit longer latency and, in addition, can relate to many aspects of movement in the environment and not just to our own arm movements. Therefore, the motor system may not always find visual movement cues as relevant for predictive control of dynamics.