We investigated the human capacity to acquire multiple visuomotor mappings for de novo skills. Using a grid navigation paradigm, we tested whether contextual cues implemented as different "grid worlds", allow participants to learn two distinct key-mappings more efficiently. Our results indicate that when contextual information is provided, task performance is significantly better. The same held true for meta-reinforcement learning agents that differed in whether or not they receive contextual information when performing the task. We evaluated their accuracy in predicting human performance in the task and analyzed their internal representations. The results indicate that contextual cues allow the formation of separate representations in space and time when using different visuomotor mappings, whereas the absence of them favors sharing one representation. While both strategies can allow learning of multiple visuomotor mappings, we showed contextual cues provide a computational advantage in terms of how many mappings can be learned.

翻译：我们研究了人类习得多种视觉运动映射以实现全新技能的认知能力。通过采用网格导航范式，我们检验了以不同“网格世界”形式实现的上下文线索是否能使参与者更高效地学习两种不同的按键映射。结果表明，当提供上下文信息时，任务表现显著提升。这一结论同样适用于在执行任务时决定是否接收上下文信息的元强化学习智能体。我们评估了这些智能体在预测人类任务表现方面的准确性，并分析了其内部表征。研究结果表明，上下文线索允许在使用不同视觉运动映射时形成时空分离的表征，而缺乏上下文线索则倾向于共享单一表征。尽管两种策略均可支持多种视觉运动映射的学习，但我们证明了上下文线索在学习映射数量的可扩展性方面具有计算优势。