Savings upon Re-Aiming in Visuomotor Adaptation

Savings is the phenomenon in which people show faster relearning of a previously forgotten memory. In the motor learning domain, this phenomenon has been a puzzle for learning models that operate exclusively on error-based learning processes. We demonstrate, in a series of experiments, that savings selectively reflects improvements in action selection: Participants are more adept in invoking an appropriate aiming strategy when presented with a previously experienced perturbation. Indeed, improvements in action selection appear to be the sole source of savings in visuomotor adaptation tasks. We observe no evidence of savings in implicit error-based adaptation.