AUTHOR=Park Se-Woong , Dijkstra Tjeerd , Sternad Dagmar TITLE=Learning to never forget—time scales and specificity of long-term memory of a motor skill JOURNAL=Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience VOLUME=7 YEAR=2013 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/computational-neuroscience/articles/10.3389/fncom.2013.00111 DOI=10.3389/fncom.2013.00111 ISSN=1662-5188 ABSTRACT=

Despite anecdotal reports that humans retain acquired motor skills for many years, if not a lifetime, long-term memory of motor skills has received little attention. While numerous neuroimaging studies showed practice-induced cortical plasticity, the behavioral correlates, what is retained and also what is forgotten, are little understood. This longitudinal case study on four subjects presents detailed kinematic analyses of humans practicing a bimanual polyrhythmic task over 2 months with retention tests after 6 months and, for two subjects, after 8 years. Results showed that individuals not only retained the task, but also reproduced their individual “style” of performance, even after 8 years. During practice, variables such as the two hands' frequency ratio and relative phase, changed at different rates, indicative of multiple time scales of neural processes. Frequency leakage across hands, reflecting intermanual crosstalk, attenuated at a significantly slower rate and was the only variable not maintained after 8 years. Complementing recent findings on neuroplasticity in gray and white matter, our study presents new behavioral evidence that highlights the multi-scale process of practice-induced changes and its remarkable persistence. Results suggest that motor memory may comprise not only higher-level task variables but also individual kinematic signatures.