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.