The Role of Augmented Feedback on Motor Learning: A Systematic Review

In motor learning, augmented feedback (AF) is the information provided by sources outside the body and encompasses visual feedback, auditory feedback, and multimodal augmented feedback. This review aims to examine the most recent evidence on these different modality types in healthy and diseased populations and athletes. The reporting of this review was guided by the standards of the “Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis (PRISMA)” statement with the aim to examine the most recent evidence on these feedback types in healthy and diseased populations and athletes. The literature search for this review has been limited to electronic journals with the search engines ISI Web of Knowledge, OvidSP EMBASE, and PubMed databases. This review considers visual feedback as the cornerstone of all augmented feedback types by citing its superiority in learning complex skills by medical students and balance maintenance by older adults. The review also deciphers the role of auditory augmented feedback in encumbering already burdened visual connections in the rehabilitation of patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD) and prosthetic limbs and further argues why the multimodal feedback model seems to be the most efficient way to offer feedback in learning motor tasks by alluding to multifaceted “skill training communication model” in the prevention of sports injuries such as anterior cruciate ligament tears. Multimodal augmented feedback seems to be the most effective and appropriate way to give feedback during motor learning in healthy and diseased populations and athletes as its stimuli are perceived faster and tend to be retained longer compared with the unimodal stimuli of auditory and visual feedback mechanisms.