Split-belt walking: An experience that is hard to forget.

Background: The common paradigm to study the adaptability of human gait is split-belt walking. Short-term savings (minutes to days) of split-belt adaptation have been widely studied to gain knowledge in locomotor learning but reports on long-term savings are limited. Here, we studied whether after a prolonged inter-exposure interval (three weeks), the newly acquired locomotor pattern is subject to forgetting or that the pattern is saved in long-term locomotor memory.

Anticipatory control of human gait following simulated slip exposure.

A cautious gait (CG), marked by wider and shorter steps, is typically employed to mitigate expected perturbations proactively. However, it is not well understood if and how CG is informed by the task requirements. Therefore, we assessed how CG is adjusted to these requirements.