CAREER: Paradoxical benefits of distraction for motor memory

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A pilot operating an aircraft and a stroke victim recovering the ability to walk must learn (or learn again) pertinent motor skills. Importantly, these motor skills are often used in new situations, where attention may be distracted by other events or objects. For example, during an emergency the pilot must continue to operate the aircraft while maintaining communications with ground authorities and other crew members and assessing the state of the aircraft. Similarly, a stroke patient recovering the ability to walk must attend to cars, other pedestrians, and obstacles in the path in order to avoid collisions. Attentional demands may also differ when a motor skill is first learned and when it is performed at a later time. What if skills learned when there is no distraction deteriorate when distractions are present at recall, or vice versa? How might motor learning programs be developed that can train successful transfer of motor skills to novel situations? With the support of an NSF CAREER award, Dr. Joo-Hyun Song at Brown University will characterize mechanisms involved in coping with attentional distractions during motor learning and will develop a training program to promote robust long-term learning despite a wide range of distractions. Dr. Song will mentor nationally and locally selected undergraduates in a 10-week summer research program, with participants recruited through two initiatives designed to prepare qualified undergraduates from diverse minority backgrounds for M.D. and Ph.D. programs (the Blueprint Program for Enhancing Neuroscience Diversity through Undergraduate Research Education Experiences and the Leadership Alliance Summer Research-Early Identification Program). Dr. Song will also provide a longer-term nationwide mentoring program for under-represented students identified from minority-serving institutions (from the end of their freshman year to graduation). In addition, Dr. Song will collaborate with the Sci-Toons initiative, a science education program at Brown University's Science Center, to create and broadcast two multimedia science episodes based on results of her research and aimed at K-12 students and the general public. This research project aims to characterize visuomotor skills within a wider theoretical framework where the motor skill is modulated by attention and memory. Dr. Song will investigate 1) which components of attentional distractors are encoded into motor memory; 2) when the integration between distraction and motor memory occurs; and 3) how to develop a long-term, robust motor learning program in which motor memory can be trained to be adaptable under a variety of situations. The work should provide a basis for a unified theoretical framework of attention, motor learning, and memory mechanisms across disciplines including cognitive science, neuroscience, and biomedical engineering.