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 (i.e., “ceiling effect”). One bottleneck to overcome it is no prior physical experience of the skill to be learned. Here we challenge this issue through having expert pianists passively experience fast and complex finger movements that cannot be performed voluntarily, by using a novel hand exoskeleton-robot that can move individual fingers fast and independently. Although the skill plateaued through weeks of practice, passive exposure to otherwise impossible complex finger movements generated by the exoskeleton-robot at a speed faster than their fastest one enabled the pianists to play faster. Neither a training undergoing fast but simple finger movements nor one undergoing slow but complex movements enhanced the overtrained motor skill. Passive training with one hand also improved the motor skill of the untrained contra-lateral hand, demonstrating the inter-manual transfer effect. T..., , , # Surmounting the ceiling effect of motor expertise by novel sensory experience

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.70rxwdc6h ](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.70rxwdc6h)

We have submitted our piano keystroke data of the experiment 1(**EXO_IKIplot.mat**), piano keystroke data before and after five sets of intervention for the experiment 2 (**IKI_5training_comparison.mat**), tensor decomposition data of the finger kinematics of the experiment 3 (**tensordata_righthand.mat**), and MATLAB scripts for plotting the keystroke data of the experiment 1(**plot_ExoIKIdata.m**) and the keystroke data of the experiment 2 (**plot_ExoIKIdata_after5training.m**).

## Description of the data and file structure

### **EXO\_IKIplot.mat**

* *Grp_IKI_home*: The av...