Editorial: Online and Offline Modulators of Motor Learning

What are the multitude of factors and processes that shape the acquisition and stabilization of a new motor skill? This is an important question that needs to be meticulously considered in order to design efficient paradigms for sports training programs as well as new rehabilitative protocols for restoring motor function following trauma or disease. Although the motor learning literature is abundant with research investigating the behavioral and neuronal determinants of online and offline motor learning (i.e., occurring during and after motor practice, respectively), an integrated view of the various factors influencing these determinants is not available in the literature. The aim of this Research Topic is therefore to address this gap and to bring together a set of articles that document how different factors modulate online and offline motor learning. Critically, this special issue presents a wide range of modulators targeting both online and offline motor learning processes that can potentially be translated into clinical applications. Specifically, interventions including brain stimulation (Savic and Meier), exercise (Taubert et al.), the manipulation of the nature of motor practice (actual vs. imagination, Di Rienzo et al.), the timing of motor practice (de Beukelaar et al.), the training schedule (Müssgens and Ullén), the nature of the learned material (Du et al.), the cognitive load (Borragan et al.), the psychosocial context (Zemankova et al.), the availablity of visual (Rjosk et al.), or sensory (van Polanen and Davare) feedback all represent promising modulators of online motor learning processes. This special issue also reports interventions directly targeting offline processes, including the manipulation of post-practice vigilance and activity states, with the introduction of post-training sleep (Csabi et al.; Di Rienzo et al.; Malangre and Blischke) and exercise (Taubert et al.), but also the manipulation of the number and timing of the practice sessions after initial practice (triggering reactivation and reconsolidation processes, de Beukelaar et al.). Last, what makes this special issue unique is not only the variety of motor learning tasks investigated (from finer e.g., de Beukelaar et al. to grosser e.g., Malangre and Blischke), but also the diversity of populations studied [from children (e.g., Julius and Adi-Japha) to elderly (e.g., Zemankova et al.); in healthy but also pathological conditions (e.g., Csabi et al.; Zemankova et al.)]. With respect to the variety of tasks investigated, we would like to highlight two papers in particular that examined motor tasks that are highly relevant in clinical settings. Specifically, Rjosk et …