Abstract
A common problem experts experience is the challenge of overcoming the ceiling effects of highly trained sensorimotor skills. Recent studies have demonstrated that the amount of practice fails to explain interindividual variation in experts’ motor expertise, implicating hidden bottlenecks that prevent experts from overcoming this ceiling. Here, we show that somatosensory function in motion is one that defines further improvement of the sensorimotor skills of expert pianists. We found that even in expert pianists, specialized training that was designed to enhance somatosensory perception in motion improved sensorimotor skills in which feedback, but not feedforward, control plays a predominant role. Furthermore, training increased reliance on afferent information in motion relative to predictive information that could originate from internal models of movement. Together, these findings suggest that enhancement of somatosensory processing in motion improves the somatosensory-motor feedback loop and thereby enabling experts to surpass the ceiling that initially limited their motor expertise.
Competing Interest Statement
The authors have declared no competing interest.
