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The Journal of Neuroscience, November 15, 2006, 26(46):11888-11892; doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1320-06.2006

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Brief Communications
Intermittent Practice Facilitates Stable Motor Memories

Simon A. Overduin,¹ Andrew G. Richardson,² Courtney E. Lane,¹ Emilio Bizzi,¹ and Daniel Z. Press³

¹Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, ²Division of Health Sciences and Technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard Medical School, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02142, and ³Department of Neurology, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts 02215

Correspondence should be addressed to Dr. Daniel Z. Press, Assistant Professor in Neurology, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School, 330 Brookline Avenue, Boston, MA 02215. Email: dpress{at}bidmc.harvard.edu

Humans adaptively control reaching movements to maintain good performance in the presence of novel forces acting on the arm. A recent study suggested that motor memories of different force conditions are not transformed from fragile to stable states, but rather are always vulnerable to interference from newly learned conditions (Caithness et al., 2004). This is contrary to the results of previous studies (Brashers-Krug et al., 1996; Shadmehr and Brashers-Krug, 1997), although all of these studies followed similar methods. Here, we show that a seemingly insignificant and inconsistently applied methodological detail may reconcile this discrepancy. Catch trials, in which the novel forces are removed, may be randomly interspersed among the more frequent force trials to assess how a subject is learning to predict the pattern of forces. In the absence of an interfering condition, subjects retained their learning until retest a day later regardless of whether they experienced catch trials. But in the presence of an interfering condition, only the subjects who had experienced forces intermittently retained their learning and thereby showed resistance to the interference. Thus, intermittent rather than constant practice conditions appear to be critical for dynamic motor memory stabilization.

Key words: motor; movement; learning; consolidation; memory; arm

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Received March 28, 2006; revised Sept. 12, 2006; accepted Oct. 10, 2006.

Correspondence should be addressed to Dr. Daniel Z. Press, Assistant Professor in Neurology, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School, 330 Brookline Avenue, Boston, MA 02215. Email: dpress{at}bidmc.harvard.edu

This article has been cited by other articles:

				W. M. Joiner and M. A. Smith Long-Term Retention Explained by a Model of Short-Term Learning in the Adaptive Control of Reaching J Neurophysiol, November 1, 2008; 100(5): 2948 - 2955. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]

				S. E. Criscimagna-Hemminger and R. Shadmehr Consolidation Patterns of Human Motor Memory J. Neurosci., September 24, 2008; 28(39): 9610 - 9618. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]

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