Event:

In ball sports, the role of backswing and follow-through are both considered important for generating a good shot, even though they play no direct role in hitting the ball. Here we demonstrate the scientific basis of both of these phenomena by showing that immediate lead-in and follow-through movements affect the learning and recall of motor memories during skill acquisition. We present results from a set of experiments that investigated their effects on dynamic learning using a vBOT robotic manipulandum. Firstly we show that in a two-part movement task, immediate past lead-in movement can act as a contextual cue enabling learning of both opposing force fields in the second movement. However the effect dies away rapidly as the dwell time between the two movements parts increased towards one second. We next examine the angular generalization characteristics of passive and visual lead-in movements. We found that passive lead-in movements show a similar tuning characteristic to normal active movements, whereas visual lead-in movements exhibit much shallower and wider tuning. We then present results from a set of experiments that demonstrate the corresponding contextual effects of follow-through movement. We extended this study to show that the diversity of the follow-through movements also affects the rate of learning in the preceding dynamic leaning task. Finally we show that the contextual effects of both lead-in and follow-through movements can operative in a single task that requires both. Overall our results suggest that there is a critical period both before and after a current movement that determines motor memory activation and affects learning.