Motor variability has emerged as an important component of movement control research, informative of learning and optimization strategies in the nervous system [ 1- 9].
Reduced motor variability, for example, has been observed in subjects with chronic pain [ 39], and may be emblematic of a pre-existing motor dysfunction or of an inappropriate long-term compensation following an acute injury [ 40].
When timing variability has previously been compared in explicit and implicit measures of motor timing, temporal variance differed across tasks, suggesting that separable timing mechanisms were recruited [7], [8], [26], [36].
Increased gait variability has been defined as dementia-specific gait disorder not only associated to motor disorders but also to problems with central processing of information [ 51].
Those whose heart rates had the lowest variability had a 40percentt mortality rate.
Ice cores reveal that greater variability has heralded past rapid change.
However, the neural circuit mechanisms that regulate motor variability as a function of learning have not been identified.
Importantly, the main conclusion of the paper, how learning‐ related strengthening and pruning of action‐specific connections in a motor control network allows motor variability to be reduced, could not have been arrived at without the new data we provide.
Across healthy participants, those who had the greatest increase in velocity also had the greatest decrease in motor variability, indicating stronger motivational effects (r = 0.23, p = 0.001; Figure S4A).
Having learning-related reorganization of action-specific connections regulate motor variability lends considerable flexibility to the process of motor skill learning.
