Tadayoshi Asaka ^1* Yoshiro Okubo ² Naoya Hasegawa ³

• ¹ Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan
• ² Neuroscience Research Australia, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
• ³ Faculty of Health Sciences, Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Hokkaidō, Japan

presents some challenges when incongruent postural control priorities exist. These include but not limited to trade-offs between stability and flexibility, automatic versus voluntary control, and inherent versus compensatory mechanisms. This involves reliance on certain sensory domains such as visual, vestibular, proprioceptive or tactile feedback when adapting its posture to environmental stimuli. A better understanding of postural control priorities can aid in finding an effective and personalized approach to motor learning in healthy younger and older adults, rehabilitation for individuals with neurological diseases, and promote healthy daily living.Research to understand postural control priorities-that is, individual's preference for postural control matured by the adaptation to their environment-takes various forms.The deeper interpretation of the controlled behaviors focused on the postural control priorities and a more effective learning approach based on that interpretation are addressed in this research topic. The objective of this research topic is two: 1) To establish an openly available resource highlighting current evidence on postural control priorities, and 2) to guide future investigations aimed at elucidating the impact of postural control priorities on effective motor learning. Multidisciplinary approaches including biomedical engineering, neurophysiology, and computational neuroscience are essential to enhance the understanding of postural control priorities and their impact on motor learning. This research topic thus aims to expand the discussion of recent advances, technologies, solutions, applications, and emerging challenges in the fields of motor control and motor learning.In this research topic, four manuscripts of original research were published. Three studies focused on enhancing the understanding of postural control. Jeon W and colleagues investigated the influence of smoothness and speed of stand-to-sit movement on joint kinematics, kinetics, muscle activation patterns, and postural stability in younger adults.The results showed that smooth stand-to-sit movements facilitate enhanced knee eccentric control and increased joint work at both the hip and knee joints, along with increased involvement of hip joint muscles to effectively manage falling momentum. Furthermore, the increased contributions of knee and hip joint work reduced postural sway in the vertical and medio-lateral directions, respectively. Lebert A and colleagues explored the influence of facial expressions of anger and fear combined with direct or averted gaze on both forward stepping and quiet standing in younger adults. The findings suggested that steps were initiated faster with angry faces than with fearful faces. However, the significant effect of gaze direction and postural immobility associated with fearful faces were not observed. Liu X and colleagues investigated the effects of long-term Tai Chi (TC) practice on sensory reweighting and self-motion perception for postural control under single-sensory and multisensory perturbations in older adults. The results showed that TC practitioners exhibited higher postural stability and complexity of postural fluctuations as task difficulty increased, and shorter time windows to return to baseline levels as disturbances progressed, compared with non-practitioners. Moreover, TC practitioners exhibited significantly greater weighting on unperturbed sensory systems, lower weighting on perturbed sensory systems for postural control, and higher selfmotion perception ability under visual, vestibular, and visual-vestibular perturbations. The fourth study focused on motor leaning. Sato Y examined the effects of mental and physical training on immediate generalization and retention of a drawing task with different levels of difficulty in younger adults. The results found that immediate generalization was associated with larger gains by mental training rather than physical training regardless of the difficulty of the task, while the training modality had no significant effect on retention, although retention was influenced by the difficulty of the task.While we aimed to publish more than ten manuscripts in this research topic, the final number of four represents significant contributions despite challenges. Investigating postural control priorities often requires large participant samples to account for individual preference and their positive or negative effects, making such studies demanding. Additionally, overlapping with themes from other journal special issues may have impacted submissions. However, the strong interest in this research topic, with approximately 3,000 views and downloads, highlights its relevance and potential influence. We remain optimistic that this initiative will spark further exploration and drive progress in the fields of motor control and motor learning.