Visuomotor Adaptation of Lower Extremity Movements During Virtual Ball-Kicking Task

Abstract

Sophisticated soccer players can skillfully manipulate a ball with their feet depending on the external environment. This ability of goal-directed control in the lower limbs has not been fully elucidated, although upper limb movements have been studied extensively using motor adaptation tasks. The purpose of this study was to clarify how the goal-directed movements of the lower limbs is acquired by conducting an experiment of visuomotor adaptation in ball-kicking movements. In this study, healthy young participants with and without experience playing soccer or futsal performed ball-kicking movements. They were instructed to move a cursor representing the right foot position and shoot a virtual ball to a target on a display in front of them. During the learning trials, the trajectories of the virtual ball were rotated by 15° either clockwise or counterclockwise relative to the actual ball direction. As a result, participants adapted their lower limb movements to novel visuomotor perturbation regardless of the soccer playing experience, and changed their whole trajectories not just the kicking position during adaptation. These results indicate that the goal-directed lower limb movements can be adapted to the novel environment. Moreover, it was suggested that fundamental structure of visuomotor adaptation is common between goal-directed movements in the upper and lower limbs.

Anticipatory postural control in adaptation of goal-directed lower extremity movements

“…Overall, the adaptation pattern observed in the kicking movements was consistent with the findings of previous studies on visuomotor adaptation in arm-reaching 7 , 8 and kicking movements 9 showing gradual reduction in the endpoint errors and a remarkable aftereffect in the initial washout trials (Fig. 4 ).…”

“…The right foot position was captured by the real-time motion tracking system 9 , 33 . Trajectories of a rigid body created by four infrared reflective markers attached on the instep of the right foot were recorded at 100 Hz using the three-dimensional optical motion capture system (OptiTrack V100, Natural Point Inc., Oregon, United States).…”

“…In the baseline and washout periods, the position of the right foot cursor corresponded to the actual position of the participant’s right foot on the horizontal plane. In the perturbation period, a visuomotor perturbation was introduced without informing participants to examine the process of visuomotor learning 9 , 25 , 34 . In the current study, the trajectories of the right foot were rotated by 12° clockwise relative to the actual trajectories (Fig.…”

“…These studies revealed that goal-directed movements with the upper limb can be adapted to a novel visuomotor environment or novel dynamics. Recently, we demonstrated that goal-directed movements with the lower limb can also be adapted to a novel visuomotor environment in which the trajectory of the kicked ball is rotated from the actual trajectory 9 . However, how posture is controlled in the support leg during the adaptation of the kicking leg remains unclear.…”

“…The purpose of this study was to investigate how a standing posture is controlled during the adaptation of goal-directed movements in the lower limb, focusing on anticipatory postural control. To this end, COP displacement in the support leg was measured when the visual feedback of the endpoint of the kicking leg was rotated relative to the actual trajectory 9 . This study conducted exploratory examination of the anticipatory postural control in the support leg and quantified its behaviour during visuomotor adaptation in the kicking leg movements.…”