Visuomotor Adaptation is a Disturbance Rejection Problem

This paper shows that visuomotor adaptation can be cast as a disturbance rejection problem. We begin by formalizing experimentally observed dynamic properties of adaptation in terms of the transient response of a stable linear system, and we discuss implications on the validity of classes of models. Next, we solve the visuomotor adaptation problem by invoking adaptive internal models. A theoretical result on stability is obtained using averaging theory. Simulations applied to a visuomotor rotation experiment with fast arm reaches show that the dynamic properties of adaptation are recovered using the model.