A decay-based account of learning and adaptation in complex skills.

How do humans adapt to parametric changes in a task without having to learn a new skill from scratch? Many studies of memory and sensorimotor adaptation have proposed theories that incorporate a decay on prior events, which leads the agent to eventually forget old experiences. This study investigates if a similar decay mechanism can account for human adaptation in complex skills that require the simultaneous integration of cognitive, motor, and perceptual processes. In 2 experiments, subjects learned to play a novel racing video game while adapting to parametric changes in the physics of the game's controls.