The goal of MotMotLearn is understand how reward, punishment and dopamine influences motor learning. In total, 1450+ young healthy participants, 150+ older adults and 115+ clinical patients have been tested. After completion of the 5-year project, we have shown that motivational feedback has substantially differing effects depending on the type of motor learning being tested (Chen et al., 2017 & 2018). In addition, there also appears to be considerable individual differences between participants in terms of their ability to use reward-based feedback to learn new motor actions. Specifically, we found that only 2/3 of participants were able to learn with reward-based feedback (Holland et al., 2018; Codol et al., 2018). We have also begun to uncover the mechanisms which underlie the reward-based improvements in motor performance at a behavioural, neural and computational level (Codol et al., 2020; Codol et al., 2020). We examined whether genetic variability or working memory capacity could help explain individual differences in reward-based learning ability in a large cohort of participants (n=240). We found that working memory capacity, but not dopamine-related genetic variability, is predictive of reward-based motor learning ability (Holland et al., 2019). The role of dopamine has been examined using Parkinson’s disease patients and pharmacology. While Parkinson’s disease patients clearly show differences in reward/punishment sensitivity (Chen et al., 2020), we have been unable to modulate reward-based performance using Levodopa or Haloperidol (pharmacology) in young healthy adults (Sporn et al., in prep) or older healthy adults (Holland et al., in prep). In terms of stroke patients, we have shown that reward- and punishment-based feedback enhances the amount stroke patients (n=45) learn within a day and also how much they remember across days (Quattrocchi et al., 2017). We have also examined the improvements which occur in a large group (n=50) of stroke patients undergoing an intensive rehabilitation intervention with the goal being to understand the key aspects which reward could be used to improve (Dawson et al., in prep). In addition, we showed how reward can enhance performance of complex sequential actions and lead to long-term improvements in behaviour (Sporn et al., 2020). The final 12 months (including a 6 month extension) have been used to develop effective behavioural tasks that enables individuals to be assessed online (via smartphone and virtual reality devices). This promises to be an exciting avenue for future research in which this technology can be used to develop online rehabilitation interventions. Four exceptional team members made important contributions to the project and have all made successful transitions to the next stages of their career. Despite Covid, MotMotLearn has achieved its major planned deliverables of the project. This has delivered 10 influential research articles involving research staff from the grant and a further 11 involving the principal investigator, whilst research results have been presented at 13 international conferences and 13 world-leading Universities. The work from MotMotLearn led to an ERC proof-of-concept grant being awarded which aims to develop at-home reward-based interventions for stroke patients. Work from MotMotLearn has been presented at 10 outreach activities aimed to disseminate the results to the general public. In addition, MotMotLearn had its own webpage and regular updates were provided through twitter, YouTube and podcasts.
