Motor learning vs motor recovery
Motor learning: acquisition and/or modification of movement
Motor recovery: re-acquisition of movement skills lost through injury
Motor learning
A set of processes associated with practice or experience leading to relatively permanent changes in the capability for producing skilled action
4 important components of motor learning
- Process of acquiring capability for skilled action
- Results from experience or practice
- Cannot be measured directly - instead, is inferred from behavior
- Produces a relatively permanent change in behavior
True or false? Changes in motor performance that result from practice reflect motor learning?
False. If performance improves with practice but is not retained, it is not motor learning.
Performance vs learning
Performance: temporary change in motor behavior seen during practice sessions
Learning: relatively permanent change
Attention
Cognitive process by which people can detect, select, sustain, or shift awareness among a myriad of relevant information and stimuli.
During learning, continuous influx of information from action itself and surrounding environment.
Internal vs external focus of attention
Focus on the movement itself (internal focus) or movement outcomes (external focus)
Forms of learning and memory
Implicit
- Non-associative learning: habitualization and sensitization
- Associative learning: classical and operant conditioning
- Procedural learning: tasks and habits
Explicit
- Facts and events
Schmidt’s Schema Theory
Information in short term memory is abstracted into two schemas:
1. Recall (motor)
2. Recognition (sensory)
Schmidt’s Schema Theory: Recall schema - response selection
- For each movement, a movement parameter (e.g. force) is applied; then input received about movement’s accuracy
- With repeated movements using different parameters with different outcomes, nervous system creates relationship between parameter and movement outcome (“rule”)
- Each new movement adds new data point to refine the rule
- After each movement, only the rule is retained
Ecological theory
Motor learning is process that increases coordination between perception and action in manner consistent with task and environmental constraints
During practice, search for optimal strategies to solve the task, given the constraints
Exploration of perceptual workspace and motor workspace
Schmidt’s Schema Theory: Recognition schema - evaluate response
- Sensory consequences and outcomes of previous movements coupled with current initial conditions to create representation of expected sensory consequences
- Representation compared to sensory information from outgoing movement to evaluate efficiency of response
- When movement is over, any error information is fed back into schema and schema is modified
Fitts and Posner’s Three Stage Model
- Cognitive
- Experimenting with different strategies
- High variability in performance
- Large improvements - Associative
- Refining the skill
- Less variability in performance
Slower improvements - Autonomous
- Performance becomes automatic
- Little attention required - too much attention can degrade performance
Bernstein’s Three-Stage Model
Learning to control degrees of freedom of body segments involved in the movement
- Novice
- Advanced
- Expert
