RESEARCH ARTICLE Mapping Shape to Visuomotor Mapping: Learning and Generalisation of Sensorimotor Behaviour Based on Contextual Information

Humans can learn and store multiple visuomotor mappings (dual-adaptation) when feed-back for each is provided alternately. Moreover, learned context cues associated with each mapping can be used to switch between the stored mappings. However, little is known about the associative learning between cue and required visuomotor mapping, and how learning generalises to novel but similar conditions. To investigate these questions, partici-pants performed a rapid target-pointing task while we manipulated the offset between visual feedback and movement end-points. The visual feedback was presented with horizontal off-sets of different amounts, dependent on the targets shape. Participants thus needed to use different visuomotor mappings between target location and required motor response de-pending on the target shape in order to “hit ” it. The target shapes were taken from a continu-ous set of shapes, morphed between spiky and circular shapes. After training we tested participants performance, without feedback, on different target shapes that had not been learned previously. We compared two hypotheses. First, we hypothesised that participants could (explicitly) extract the linear relationship between target shape and visuomotor map