Surmounting the ceiling effect of motor expertise by novel sensory experience with a hand exoskeleton

For trained individuals such as athletes and musicians, learning often plateaus after extensive training, known as the “ceiling effect.” One bottleneck to overcome it is having no prior physical experience with the skill to be learned. Here, we challenge this issue by exposing expert pianists to fast and complex finger movements that cannot be performed voluntarily, using a hand exoskeleton robot that can move individual fingers quickly and independently. Although the skill of moving the fingers quickly plateaued through weeks of piano practice, passive exposure to otherwise impossible complex finger movements generated by the exoskeleton robot at a speed faster than the pianists’ fastest one enabled them to play faster. Neither a training for fast but simple finger movements nor one for slow but complex movements with the exoskeleton enhanced the overtrained motor skill. The exoskeleton training with one hand also improved the motor skill of the untrained contralateral hand, demonstrating the intermanual transfer effect. The training altered patterns of coordinated activities across multiple finger muscles during piano playing but not in general motor and somatosensory functions or in anatomical characteristics of the hand (range of motion). Patterns of the multifinger movements evoked by transcranial magnetic stimulation over the left motor cortex were also changed through passive exposure to fast and complex finger movements, which accompanied increased involvement of constituent movement elements characterizing the individuated finger movements. The results demonstrate evidence that somatosensory exposure to an unexperienced motor skill allows surmounting of the ceiling effect in a task-specific but effector-independent manner.