Transfer as a function of exploration and stabilization in original practice

The identification of practice conditions that provide flexibility to perform successfully in transfer is a long-standing issue in motor learning but is still not well understood. Here we investigated the hypothesis that a search strategy that encompasses both exploration and stabilization of the perceptual-motor workspace will enhance performance in transfer. Twenty-two participants practiced a virtual projection task (120 trials on each of 3 days) and subsequently performed two transfer conditions (20 trials/condition) with different constraints in the angle to project the object. The findings revealed a quadratic relation between exploration in practice (indexed by autocorrelation and distribution of error) and subsequent performance error in transfer. The integration of exploration and stabilization of the perceptual-motor workspace enhances transfer to tasks with different constraints on the scaling of motor output.