CogSci 2025

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August 01, 2025

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San Francisco, United States

keywords:

skill acquisition and learning

motor control

neuroscience

psychology

memory

Recent work has shown that visuomotor adaptation is supported by both implicit recalibration, which appears to be highly constrained, and explicit strategies which seem more flexible and capable of delivering rapid performance gains. However, explicit strategies appear to have strict capacity constraints, bearing remarkable similarity to the limits observed with spatial working memory, which could limit their usefulness in more complex learning problems. Here, we sought¬ to determine the ability of both explicit strategies and implicit recalibration to overcome a complex set of visuomotor perturbations. We find that implicit recalibration is unable to track multiple perturbations, in line with prior findings. In contrast, explicit strategies are effective when task complexity is within the capacity of working memory. These findings highlight the constraints that working memory imposes on visuomotor adaptation and suggest that motor skill learning may be limited by the demands placed on working memory.

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