Abstract
Skill learning involves the formation of stable motor patterns. In musical and athletic training, however, these stable patterns can also impede the attainment of higher levels of performance, and hence constitute a motor habit. We developed an experimental paradigm to induce a specific motor pattern in a sequence production task and investigated how it affected subsequent optimization over a 3-week training period. Participants initially practiced small segments of 2 to 3 finger movements, which were then combined to form longer sequences. This initial training induced a persistent chunking behavior, with shorter inter-press-intervals within a chunk and longer ones at chunk boundaries. We were able to induce chunking that was either beneficial or detrimental to performance, and could show that the degree to which these detrimental chunk structures were maintained, predicted lower levels of final performance. We also identified two optimization processes by which participants overcame the detrimental motor habits.
Footnotes
Conflict of interest The authors declare no conflict of interest.