Context is key for learning motor skills

Collins, Anne G. E.; McDougle, Samuel D.

doi:10.1038/d41586-021-03028-x

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24 November 2021

Context is key for learning motor skills

A sophisticated theory for learning motor skills places emphasis on the need for inferring context — drawing conclusions about the structure of the environment — for efficiently storing and expressing motor memories.

Anne G. E. Collins ⁰ &
Samuel D. McDougle ¹

Anne G. E. Collins
1. Anne G. E. Collins is in the Department of Psychology and the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, California 94712, USA.
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Samuel D. McDougle
1. Samuel D. McDougle is in the Department of Psychology, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut 06520, USA.
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Humans can develop a wide variety of motor skills, from speaking and riding bicycles, to manipulating complex objects such as computer keyboards and musical instruments. Having a robust portfolio of motor skills encoded as motor memories is crucial to everyday life, but the neural and psychological principles of motor learning and memory are in many ways still a mystery. Writing in Nature, Heald et al.¹ examine the computational principles of motor-memory formation and modification. By placing context centre stage in motor learning, the authors account for various behavioural phenomena in a single, elegant computational framework.

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Nature 600, 387-388 (2021)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-03028-x

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