The influence of sleep on the adaptation of fine-motor skills

The plasticity of the sensorimotor system in the brain enables us to adapt our motor activity to the demands of our constantly changing environment, a process known as motor adaptation. Pervious research has yielded contradictory results regarding the role of sleep in motor adaptation. Some research suggest that sleep enhances performance in motor adaptation tasks, while others suggest that the effect of sleep on motor adaptation does not exceed that of a similar period of wakefulness.
Here, we attempted to disentangle the role of sleep in motor adaptation by employing a novel fine-motor task, i.e. typing on a mirrored keyboard. To this end, we trained experts in touch-typing on the regular keyboard, to type on a mirrored keyboard and measured their performance before and after a retention interval of either a full night (~8h) of sleep with polysomnography (PSG) or a similar period of wakefulness.
Using a machine learning approach, we show that brain activity in the one-second pre-movement interval predicts the outcome of the motor adaptation task. Interestingly, the decoding accuracy increased following a period of sleep but not wakefulness, with the change in decoding accuracy correlating with the change in the accuracy of typing on the mirrored keyboard. Our preliminary results suggest a role for sleep in optimizing motor adaptation processes.