All’s well that ends well: The influence of team task outcomes on individuals’ responses to their own errors

抄録

In team sports, the consequences of an individual’s action are often decoupled from team-level success or failure because teammates can compensate for individual errors. Here, we asked whether in such cooperative contexts, an individual’s learning response to their own error is modulated by team outcome, even when their actions do not directly determine that outcome. To address this question, we developed a joystick-based cooperative motor task that mimics a final pass and shot in soccer, performed by pairs of participants (passer and shooter). In error-clamp trials, where the movements of both players did not influence the ball’s trajectory, the ball always deviated by ±6 cm from the pass target (pass error), and the shot either succeeded or failed, thereby defining team task outcome. Similar to individual tasks using reaching movements, trial-by-trial changes in the passer’s movement were the hallmark of error-based learning; movements in the subsequent trial shifted in the direction that compensated for the imposed error. Crucially, the passer’s learning response was smaller following success than failure, despite identical pass errors. In the evaluation phase, the participants judged the visual consequences of the action by reporting where the ball crossed a reference line. Consistent with previous work, participants underestimated the error (the deviation between the ball and target). However, the magnitude of the underestimation was not significantly affected by team task outcomes. These findings suggest that team-level success or failure can modulate implicit motor learning in individuals in a manner that appears dissociable from reportable error perception.