TY - JOUR T1 - Intermittent Practice Facilitates Stable Motor Memories JF - The Journal of Neuroscience JO - J. Neurosci. SP - 11888 LP - 11892 DO - 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1320-06.2006 VL - 26 IS - 46 AU - Simon A. Overduin AU - Andrew G. Richardson AU - Courtney E. Lane AU - Emilio Bizzi AU - Daniel Z. Press Y1 - 2006/11/15 UR - http://www.jneurosci.org/content/26/46/11888.abstract N2 - 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. ER -