Jagar Hansen

The overall purpose of this research project is to learn more about motor learning techniques. There are two different practice strategies this research focuses on for improving coordination; bimanual and unilateral practice.. Bimanual practice involves using both sides of the body simultaneously, and unilateral practice involves using each side separately. The goal of this research is to determine which strategy demonstrates more improvement. This research will help improve the approach for motor rehabilitation for patients who have motor deficits, mainly focusing on those who have had a stroke or cerebral palsy. In this research, a Kinarm robot is used, which consists of an exoskeleton for participants arms which lets them freely move on a horizontal plane. There is also a horizontal display above participants arms that allows them to see what their arms are doing while completing a task. There were two tasks; the unilateral practice task where a triangle was traced with one hand eighty times; and the bilateral technique which consisted of tracing a triangle with each hand simultaneously eighty times. Participants consisted of healthy young adults who did each of these tasks on separate days in a cross-over design. We compared learning between the unilateral and bilateral practice conditions.The main result for each technique was a learning curve for each person that showed how the time it took to complete one trace improved as the number of traces increased, and determine when performance plateaued. The number of errors (hand leaving triangle) was also averaged and plotted for each technique to determine how accuracy improved over time. In the future, the results of this research can be further tested with participants who have cerebral palsy or have had a stroke to better understand if they would benefit more from unilateral or bilateral rehabilitation protocols.