News Finding: For example, a trained pianist can learn a new melody easier than learning how to hit a tennis serve.
Paper Finding: Following outside-manifold perturbations, performance was not impaired, which is consistent with little, if any, learning having occurred (Extended Data Fig.
News Context: For example, a trained pianist can learn a new melody easier than learning how to hit a tennis serve. As reported in Nature, the researchers found for the first time that there are limitations on how adaptable the brain is during learning and that these restrictions are a key determinant for whether a new skill will be easy or difficult to learn. Understanding how the brain's activity can be "flexed" during learning could eventually be used to develop better treatments for stroke and other brain injuries.
Paper Context: Following within-manifold perturbations, performance was impaired briefly (Extended Data Fig. Following outside-manifold perturbations, performance was not impaired, which is consistent with little, if any, learning having occurred (Extended Data Fig. Second, the difference in learnability between the two types of perturbation was present from the earliest sessions, and over the course of the study the monkeys did not improve at learning (Extended Data Fig.