Cognitive Effort and Motor Learning

A longstanding research question in the sport psychology literature has been whether a given amount of mental practice prior to performing a motor skill will enhance one's subsequent performance. The research literature, however, has not provided any clear-cut answers to this question and this has prompted the present, more comprehensive review of existing research using the meta-analytic strategy proposed by . From the 60 studies yielding 146 effect sizes the overall average effect size was .48, which suggests, as did Richardson (1967a), that mentally practicing a motor skill influences performance somewhat better than no practice at all. Effect sizes were also compared on a number of variables thought to moderate the effects of mental practice. Results from these comparisons indicated that studies employing cognitive tasks had larger average effect sizes than motor or strength tasks and that published studies had larger average effect sizes than unpublished studies. These findings are discussed in relation to several existing explanations for mental practice and four theoretical propositions are advanced.

Strength and Conditioning Journal, 2002

1985

Several studies have shown an improvement in the performance of motor skills following imagined performance of the sk4,11, or "mental practice." One unresolved issue has centered on whether the effect being observed is in*4act a practice effect. As one alternative, the effect may be a simple instance of planning when to use a skill, or deciding in advance what strategy to select. Alternatively, the possibility has been noted that mental practice may have its effects by influencing motivational factors, and not by exercising some component of the skill. A rep,,ct'is given of an experiment in which the, procedures used by G. Nigro in 1983 to study imagined practice were replicated. The Nigro study reported" that attempts to manipulate motivation make no difference in th effectiveness of imagined practice on dart throwing, where's the content of the'practice does. The results of that study appeared to eliminate motivation accounts and simultaneously to begin a specification of the relevant content of mental practice. A detcription is given of the experiment, designed both to replicate and extend Nigro's findings, and to examine the role of self-reported imagery ability using Ni §ro's procedure, a procedure that is apparently free of the confounding effects of motivation. (JD)

Physical therapy, 1990

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of mental practice in increasing the rate of skill acquisition during a novel motor task. Twenty-six subjects were randomly assigned to two groups. The Control Group (n = 13) performed only physical practice; the Experimental Group (n = 13) performed both mental and physical practice. The task was to toss, by flexing the elbow, a Ping-Pong ball held in a cup on a forearm splint to a target. The biceps brachii muscle and the long and lateral heads of the triceps brachii muscle were monitored electromyographically to determine any changes occurring during skill acquisition. The Experimental Group's accuracy improved at a significantly greater rate than that of the Control Group. In addition, the Experimental Group demonstrated changes in timing variables that led to a more efficient movement. These changes included a decrease in time from the onset of muscle activity to peak activity and an increase in the time elapsed...

NeuroImage, 2007

Extraordinary motor skills required for expert athletic or music performance require longstanding and intensive practice leading to two critical skills, a level of maximal performance that far exceeds that of non-experts and a degree of privileged focus on motor performance that excludes intrusions. This study of motor planning in expert golfers demonstrated their brain activation during their pre-shot routine to be radically different than in novices. The posterior cingulate, the amygdala-forebrain complex, and the basal ganglia were active only in novices, whereas experts had activation primarily in the superior parietal lobule, the dorsal lateral premotor area, and the occipital area. The fact that these differences are apparent before the golfer swings the club suggests that the disparity between the quality of the performance of novice and expert golfers lies at the level of the organization of neural networks during motor planning. In particular, we suggest that extensive practice over a long period of time leads experts to develop a focused and efficient organization of task-related neural networks, whereas novices have difficulty filtering out irrelevant information.

Human Movement Science, 1987

PLoS ONE, 2014

Recent research on mental representation of complex action has revealed distinct differences in the structure of representational frameworks between experts and novices. More recently, research on the development of mental representation structure has elicited functional changes in novices' representations as a result of practice. However, research investigating if and how mental practice adds to this adaptation process is lacking. In the present study, we examined the influence of mental practice (i.e., motor imagery rehearsal) on both putting performance and the development of one's representation of the golf putt during early skill acquisition. Novice golfers (N = 52) practiced the task of golf putting under one of four different practice conditions: mental, physical, mental-physical combined, and no practice. Participants were tested prior to and after a practice phase, as well as after a three day retention interval. Mental representation structures of the putt were measured, using the structural dimensional analysis of mental representation. This method provides psychometric data on the distances and groupings of basic action concepts in long-term memory. Additionally, putting accuracy and putting consistency were measured using two-dimensional error scores of each putt. Findings revealed significant performance improvements over the course of practice together with functional adaptations in mental representation structure. Interestingly, after three days of practice, the mental representations of participants who incorporated mental practice into their practice regime displayed representation structures that were more similar to a functional structure than did participants who did not incorporate mental practice. The findings of the present study suggest that mental practice promotes the cognitive adaptation process during motor learning, leading to more elaborate representations than physical practice only.

Journal of Neurophysiology, 2010

Although there is converging experimental and clinical evidences suggesting that mental training with motor imagery can improve motor performance, it is unclear how humans can learn movements through mental training despite the lack of sensory feedback from the body and the environment. In a first experiment, we measured the trial-by-trial decrease in durations of executed movements (physical training group) and mentally simulated movements (motor-imagery training group), by means of training on a multiple-target arm-pointing task requiring high accuracy and speed. Movement durations were significantly lower in posttest compared with pretest after both physical and motor-imagery training. Although both the posttraining performance and the rate of learning were smaller in motor-imagery training group than in physical training group, the change in movement duration and the asymptotic movement duration after a hypothetical large number of trials were identical. The two control groups (eye-movement training and rest groups) did not show change in movement duration. In the second experiment, additional kinematic analyses revealed that arm movements were straighter and faster both immediately and 24 h after physical and motor-imagery training. No such improvements were observed in the eye-movement training group. Our results suggest that the brain uses state estimation, provided by internal forward model predictions, to improve motor performance during mental training. Furthermore, our results suggest that mental practice can, at least in young healthy subjects and if given after a short bout of physical practice, be successfully substituted to physical practice to improve motor performance. -motor learning with combination of different rates of motor imagery and physical practice. Exp Brain Res 184: 105-113, 2008. Andersen RA, Buneo CA. Intentional maps in posterior parietal cortex. Annu Rev Neurosci 25: 189 -220, 2002. Bakker M, de Lange FP, Stevens JA, Toni I, Bloem BR. Motor imagery of gait: a quantitative approach. Exp Brain Res 179: 497-504, 2007. Bishop CM. Neural Networks for Pattern Recognition. Oxford: New York: Clarendon Press, 1995. Bove M, Tacchinoa A, Pelosin E, Moisello C, Abbruzzese G, Felice Ghilardi MF. Spontaneous movement tempo is influenced by observation of rhythmical actions. Brain Res Bull: 80: 122-127, 2009. Cerritelli B, Maruff P, Wilson P, Currie J. The effect of an external load on the force and timing components of mentally represented actions. Behav Brain Res 108: 91-96, 2000. Courtine G, Papaxanthis C, Gentili R, Pozzo T. Gait-dependent motor memory facilitation in covert movement execution. Brain Res Cogn Brain Res 22: 67-75, 2004. Debarnot U, Creveaux T, Collet C, Gemignani A, Massarelli R, Doyon J, Guillot A. Sleep-related improvements in motor learning following mental practice. Brain Cogn 69: 398 -405, 2009. Decety J, Jeannerod M, Prablanc C. The timing of mentally represented actions. Behav Brain Res 34: 35-42, 1989. Desmurget M, Grafton S. Forward modeling allows feedback control for fast reaching movements. Trends Cogn Sci 4: 423-431, 2000. Desmurget M, Reilly KT, Richard N, Szathmari A, Mottolese C, Sirigu A. Movement intention after parietal cortex stimulation in humans. Science 324: 811-813, 2009. Ehrsson HH, Geyer S, Naito E. Imagery of voluntary movement of fingers, toes, and tongue activates corresponding body-part-specific motor representations. J Neurophysiol 90: 3304 -3316, 2003. Flanagan JR, Johansson RS. Action plans used in action observation. Nature 424: 769 -771, 2003. Flanagan JR, Vetter P, Johansson RS, Wolpert DM. Prediction precedes control in motor learning. Curr Biol 13: 146 -150, 2003. Gentili R, Cahouet V, Ballay Y, Papaxanthis C. Inertial properties of the arm are accurately predicted during motor imagery. Behav Brain Res 155: 231-239, 2004. Gentili R, Papaxanthis C, Pozzo T. Improvement and generalization of arm motor performance through motor imagery practice. Neuroscience 137: 761-772, 2006. Ghilardi MF, Moisello C, Silvestri G, Ghez C, Krakauer JW. Learning of a sequential motor skill comprises explicit and implicit components that consolidate differently.

Two sequential studies were conducted to test the notion that preperformance routines (PPRs) positively affect motor performance. The first study consisted of observations and interviews with 115 elite athletes to explore crucial time periods and body positions inherent in expert preparation for performing a golf putt, tennis serve, volleyball serve, and basketball free throw. In the second study, we taught these features of PPR to novice performers: 240 male and female high school students were assigned to two motor-mental PPR, and one control condition. Findings revealed that PPR enhances motor performance and can be implemented at an early stage of learning.

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 2001

Research on judgments of verbal learning has demonstrated that participants' judgments are unreliable and often overconfident. The authors studied judgments of perceptual~motor learning. Participants learned 3 keystroke patterns on the number pad of a computer, each requiring that a different sequence of keys be struck in a different total movementtime. Practice trials on each pattern were either blocked or randomly interleaved with trials on the other patterns, and each participant wasasked, periodically, to predict his or her performance on a 24-hr test. Consistent with earlier findings, blocked practice enhanced acquisition but harmed retention. Participants, though, predicted better performance given blocked practice. These results augment research on judgments of verbal learning and suggest that humans,at their peril, interpret current ease of access to a perceptual-motorskill as a valid index of learning. Research into the subject of metacognition, or what we know about what we know,has received increasing attention over recent years (see, e.g., Metcalfe & Shimamura, 1994; Nelson, 1992). Research focused on people's abilities to predict their own future recall or recognition of studied material has demonstrated that such predictions are frequently less than accurate, sometimes very wrong, and often overconfident. Such studies, however, have tended to focus on verbal-conceptual learning, rather than on the acquisition of motor skills. The current research concerns whether metacognitive predictions of one's later ability to perform a to-belearned motor skill are similarly open to error, or, given differences between motor skills and verbal learning, protected from sucherrors. To address this question, we chose a manipulation of the conditions of skill acquisition, blocked versus random practice, which has been shownto result in a dissociation between performance during training and performanceat a delay (e.g., Shea & Morgan, 1979). Blocked practice, in whichall trials of a particular to-belearned pattern are completed before practice is begun on another pattern, is compared with random practice, in whichtrials of the to-be-learned tasks are interleaved in a semirandom fashion. Blockedpractice usually leads to smaller error during practice than does random practice, but on retention tests the opposite pattern is generally obtained. Tothe extent, then, that acquisition performance during blocked and random practice is an imperfect index of future performance, the blocked-versus-random manipulation represents a challenging andpotentially diagnostic paradigm for the purposes of examining

Perceptual and Motor Skills, 2014

This article presents an outline of a non-equilibrium model, in which motor learning is explained as a continuous process of stabilization and adaptation. The article also shows how propositions derived from this model have been tested, and discusses possible practical implications of some supporting evidence to the teaching of motor skills. The stabilization refers to a process of functional stabilization that is achieved through negative feedback mechanisms. Initially, inconsistent and incorrect responses are gradually reduced, leading to a spatial-temporal patterning of the action. The adaptation is one in which new skills are formed from the reorganization of those already acquired through the flexibility of the system, reorganization of the skill structure, or selforganization. In order to provide learners with competency for adaptation, teachers should (a) guide students to learn motor skills taking into account that the stabilization of performance is just a transitory state that must be dismantled to achieve higher levels of complexity; (b) be clear which parts (micro) compose the skills and how they interact in order to form the whole (macro); (c) manipulate the skills in terms of their temporal, spatial, and/or spatiotemporal dimensions; (d) organize practice initially in a constant way, and then in a varied regimen (random) when the motor skills involve requirements of time and force; and, inversely for motor skills with spatial demands; and (e), provide a moderate frequency of feedback.

Adv Exp Med Biol, 2013

During the initial stages of skill learning, motor performance is cognitively demanding and uncoordinated. Understanding how an individual progresses to the exquisite and automatic processes of proficient performance has not been a trivial process. Here, we review the role that error detection and correction plays in skill learning. We make a distinction between within trial error corrections, or performance adjustments made during the course of a movement that is not achieving its intended goal, and across trial error corrections, or cumulative adjustments that reflect ongoing learning. We review recent debates regarding whether skill learning is a purely implicit or subconscious process, or if it can benefit from explicit instruction.

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 2006

Three experiments were conducted to determine if the intention to perform motor sequences in the future results in similar patterns of activation and inhibition as observed for verbal scripts. In Experiments 1 and 2, intention was induced by informing one group that they would be tested on the tasks following acquisition; the other group was not informed of the retention test. Recognition tests administered prior to and after the retention test indicated a strong intention superiority effect. However, intention instructions provided either at the end of acquisition (Experiment 1) or before acquisition (Experiment 2) failed to impact acquisition or retention performance of the motor sequences, but did influence the latency of responding on the retention test. Experiment 3 was designed to replicate the results of Experiments 1 and 2 using a within-subjects design and extend these findings to observation. The results indicated that intention instructions resulted in a strong intention superiority effect for both the physical and observational practice participants, but the performance on the intentional tasks was enhanced only for the observational practice group.

PLoS Computational Biology, 2011

Visuomotor rotation tasks have proven to be a powerful tool to study adaptation of the motor system. While adaptation in such tasks is seemingly automatic and incremental, participants may gain knowledge of the perturbation and invoke a compensatory strategy. When provided with an explicit strategy to counteract a rotation, participants are initially very accurate, even without on-line feedback. Surprisingly, with further testing, the angle of their reaching movements drifts in the direction of the strategy, producing an increase in endpoint errors. This drift is attributed to the gradual adaptation of an internal model that operates independently from the strategy, even at the cost of task accuracy. Here we identify constraints that influence this process, allowing us to explore models of the interaction between strategic and implicit changes during visuomotor adaptation. When the adaptation phase was extended, participants eventually modified their strategy to offset the rise in endpoint errors. Moreover, when we removed visual markers that provided external landmarks to support a strategy, the degree of drift was sharply attenuated. These effects are accounted for by a setpoint state-space model in which a strategy is flexibly adjusted to offset performance errors arising from the implicit adaptation of an internal model. More generally, these results suggest that strategic processes may operate in many studies of visuomotor adaptation, with participants arriving at a synergy between a strategic plan and the effects of sensorimotor adaptation.