Consistent Individual Tendencies in Motor Speed–Accuracy Trade-Off

Abstract

The literature on speed–accuracy trade-off (SAT) in motor control has evidenced individuality in how individuals trade moments (e.g., mean and variance) of spatial and temporal errors. These individual tendencies could grasp tendencies of the system given previous experiences and constraints of the organism, a signature of the system control. Nonetheless, such tendency must be robust to small perturbations. Thirty participants performed nine conditions with different time and spatial criteria over 2 days (scanning). In between these scanning conditions, individuals performed a practice condition that required modifications of the individuals’ preferred spatial and temporal tendency in the SAT. Our results demonstrated that there were no systematic effects of practice in SAT preferences. However, individual analyses demonstrated significant changes for 25 out of 30 individuals. The latter either attests against a consistent preference or to a more complex characterization of individual SAT tendencies.