A paradigm to study the learning of muscle activity patterns outside of the natural repertoire
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The acquisition of novel muscle activity patterns is a key aspect of motor skill learning which can be seen at play, for example, when beginner musicians learn new guitar or piano chords. To study this process, here we introduce a new paradigm that requires quick and synchronous flexion and extension of multiple fingers. First, participants practiced all the 242 possible combinations of isometric finger flexion and extension around the metacarpophalangeal joint (i.e., chords). We found that some chords were initially extremely challenging, but participants could eventually achieve them with practice, showing that the initial difficulty did not reflect hard biomechanical constraints imposed by the interaction of tendons and ligaments. In a second experiment we found that chord learning was largely chord-specific and did not generalize to untrained chords. Finally, we explored which factors make some chords more difficult than others. Difficulty was well predicted by the muscle activity pattern required by that chord. Interestingly, difficulty related to how similar chords’ muscle activity patterns are to the muscle activity patterns required by everyday hand use, and to the overall size of the muscle activity. Together, our results suggest that the new paradigm introduced in this work may provide a valuable tool to study the neural processes underlying the acquisition of novel muscle activity patterns in the human motor system.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".