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Control becomes habitual early on when learning a novel motor skill

View ORCID ProfileChristopher S. Yang, View ORCID ProfileNoah J. Cowan, View ORCID ProfileAdrian M. Haith
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.04.28.489941
Christopher S. Yang
1Department of Neuroscience, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA
2Department of Neurology, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA
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  • For correspondence: christopher.yang@jhmi.edu
Noah J. Cowan
3Department of Mechanical Engineering, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA
4Laboratory for Computational Sensing and Robotics, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA
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Adrian M. Haith
2Department of Neurology, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA
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Abstract

When people perform the same task repeatedly, their behavior becomes habitual, or inflexible to changes in the goals or structure of a task. While habits have been hypothesized to be a key aspect of motor skill acquisition, there has been little empirical work investigating the relationship between skills and habits. To better understand this relationship, we examined whether and when people’s behavior would become habitual as they learned a challenging new motor skill. After up to ten days of practice, we altered the structure of the task to assess whether participants would flexibly adjust their behavior or habitually persist in performing the task the way they originally learned. We found that participants’ behavior became habitual early in practice—after only two days—at which point they were still relatively unskilled. These data demonstrate that motor skills become habitual after relatively little training, but can nevertheless further improve with practice.

Competing Interest Statement

The authors have declared no competing interest.

Footnotes

  • https://doi.org/10.7281/T1/FWDYPW

Copyright 
The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license.
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Posted May 07, 2022.
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Control becomes habitual early on when learning a novel motor skill
Christopher S. Yang, Noah J. Cowan, Adrian M. Haith
bioRxiv 2022.04.28.489941; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.04.28.489941
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Control becomes habitual early on when learning a novel motor skill
Christopher S. Yang, Noah J. Cowan, Adrian M. Haith
bioRxiv 2022.04.28.489941; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.04.28.489941

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