Sensitivity to Error Tolerant Solutions in a Redundant Virtual Throwing Task

Department of Psychology and Sport Science, Justus-Liebig-University, Giessen, Germany
E-mail: heiko.maurer@sport.uni-giessen.de, lisa.k.pendt@sport.uni-giessen.de, hermann.mueller@sport.uni-giessen.de

Abstract

It is suggested that when learning a redundant goaloriented motor task, people explore and choose error tolerant solutions of the task to reduce result variability. This assumption was tested with a virtual throwing task where the error tolerant solutions were designed such that subjects needed to recurrently adapt to a new tolerant solution in order to achieve high performance. We tested 13 participants who practiced the task over six days. All of them adapted to changes in error tolerant solutions although the absolute number of adaptations as well as the rate of adaptation varied strongly between subjects. Results are discussed with reference to motor noise and the integration of practice trials according to error probability.