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Carrot or stick in motor learning

Nature Neuroscience volume 18, pages 480–481 (2015)Cite this article

Subjects

A study shows that reward and punishment have distinct influences on motor adaptation. Punishing mistakes accelerates adaptation, whereas rewarding good behavior improves retention.

We both love salsa dancing, but learning salsa is not easy. When one partner misses a step, the other may punish him with a frown, but when he masters a new move, her praise rewards him—or does it make him complacent? Carrot or stick: the manner by which reward and punishment affects motor learning is a long-standing question in education, sports, therapy and beyond. In this issue of Nature Neuroscience, Galea et al.1 address this question using a simple reaching task in a perturbed visual environment.

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Figure 1: Motor control is at the intersection of three fields: psychology, neuroscience and computational science.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dagmar Sternad is in the Departments of Biology, Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Physics, and the Center for the Interdisciplinary Research on Complex Systems, Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts, USA,

    Dagmar Sternad

  2. and the Departments of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, Konrad Paul Körding is in the Sensory Motor Performance Program, Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, USA, and Physiology, Northwestern University, Chicago, Illinois, USA.,

    Konrad Paul Körding

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  1. Dagmar Sternad
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  2. Konrad Paul Körding
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Correspondence to Dagmar Sternad or Konrad Paul Körding.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Sternad, D., Körding, K. Carrot or stick in motor learning. Nat Neurosci 18, 480–481 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/nn.3978

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