Motor Control and

Learning
Motor Control and Learning

REQUIRED READING: Kandel text, Chapters 33 & 38

How do people acquire motor skills?
• Motor learning is the study of processes, people go through as
they acquire and refine motor skills.

• One must also consider variables that promot or inhibit acquisition of

these skills.

• What variables might promote or inhibit acquisition?

Once acquired, what is motor control?
• Motor control is neural, physical, and behavioral aspects of
human movement

• Does the brain integrate all sensory messages?

• Is performance based on human mood / behaviour?
• Why do we sometimes forget how to do something?
• Why do we know how to do something even when we haven’t done it in a
long time?
How do people move?
• Movement is the function of interaction of three elements:

• The learner
• The task
• The environment
Foundational knowledge
• Learner

• Do they possess underlying abilities to perform?

• Is the task developmentally appropriate?
• Were there previous similar experiences?
• Are they motivated?
• Might individual differences influence acquisition of this task?
Foundational knowledge
• Task

• Is there a high perceptual component to the task?

• Is object manipulation required?
• What body movements are required?
• Must the task be performed under a variety of conditions or under the same
condition each time?
Foundational knowledge
• Environment

• In what context will the task be performed?

• Is that context predictable or unpredictable?
• Is there a time limitation?
What is learning?
• Learning is a relatively permanent change in a person’s ability to
execute a motor skill as a result of practice or experience doing the
skill

• We can’t see learning because the internal processes can’t be directly

observed
• So how does a facilitator of learning know if the client/athlete/student
learned?
Role of performance in learning

• While we can’t see learning, we can see performance

• Performance is the execution of a skill

• Through repeated observations of a person’s performance, we infer

whether a person has learned a skill (BUT remember that
performance is not learning)
• Inferences must be based on changes that occur over time
Inferences must be accurate

• If a person is anxious, tired, experiencing equipment problems, does

impaired performance mean a loss of capability to perform certain skill?
• Could a person be ‘ON’ one day during practice, and then revert back
to previous levels of ability the next time?
Practical Application
• Nondominant hand juggling
• Two tennis balls in nondominant hand
• Toss upward and when reaches peak, toss second tennis ball; catch
first, then toss, catch second then toss
• Continue this pattern for 10 minutes
• Record the highest number of successful catches you make
Motor Skill
• Goal-oriented
• Body and limb movements required to accomplish goal
• Voluntary
• Must be learned or re-learned
Which are motor skills?
• Grasping a water bottle
• Keyboarding
• Drawing back after touching a hot iron
• Sewing a button
• Playing the drums
• The startle reflex:
Startle response is a largely unconscious defensive response to sudden
or threatening stimuli, such as sudden noise or sharp movement,
and is associated with negative affect. Eye blinking!!
Precision of Movement

• Fine motor skill

• Involving very precise movements normally accomplished using smaller
musculature
• Gross motor skill
• Places less emphasis on precision and is typically the result of multi-limb
movements
Precision of Movement

Fine Gross
Nature of Movement Organization

• Discrete
• Beginning and end points are clearly defined
• Serial
• Composed of a number of discrete skills whose integrated performance
is crucial for goal achievement
• Continuous
• Beginning and ending points are arbitrary
Predictability of Environment

Closed Open
Open/closed classification system

• Closed skill
• Environmental context is stable & predictable (does not change
from trial to trial)
• Consistency is the objective
• Technique refinement is emphasized
• Open skill
• Performer must adapt performance to the ever changing
environment
• Practice should emphasize responding to changing demands
Individual Differences

• Individual differences are relatively stable and enduring characteristics that make
each of us unique
• Examples:
• Body configuration
• Physiological make-up
• Learning styles
• Type and amount of previous movement experience
• Developmental level
• Cultural background
• Psychological make-up
*Abilities are the building blocks on which we develop
our skills
*They reflect our capacity of learning a new motor skill
quickly and successfully
*As a result, some people perform motor activities
better than the others
*For example, if two subjects have same amount of
practice and same level of motivation to perform a skill,
then individual motor learning abilities will influence
level of performance success.
*This effect of individual learning can be seen
collectively in many behavioral experiments in which
naïve subjects are made to learn new motor skills
Abilities
• Genetic traits that are prerequisite to the development of skill
proficiency
• Existence of a single, general motor ability?
• Can a person be born an ‘all around athlete’?
• Specificity hypothesis?
• Do we develop specific abilities rather than all around abilities?
Research does not support a single, general motor ability.
Fleishman’s Taxonomy
Groups motor abilities into two categories of fundamental abilities:

1. Perceptual motor abilities

2. Physical proficiency abilities
• These abilities are stable and genetically determined
Perceptual Motor Abilities
• Control precision • Manual dexterity
• Multi-limb coordination • Finger dexterity
• Response orientation • Arm-hand steadiness
• Reaction time • Wrist finger speed
• Speed of limb movement • Aiming
• Rate control
Physical Proficiency Abilities
• Static strength • Dynamic flexibility
• Dynamic strength • Gross body coordination
• Explosive strength • Gross body equilibrium
• Trunk strength • Stamina
• Extent flexibility
Motor Abilities
• People tend to perform motor tasks well according to their motor
abilities

• Abilities limit the ultimate level of performance proficiency of an individual

• For example, body type will influence the ability to become an elite sprinter or a sprinter
‘wanna be’
• However, avoid making final judgement on a person in early stages of practice. As
experience and practice increase, performers may become more successful at using their
underlying abilities to become more skilled
• Abilities are not the only contributing factor
• Previous experiences
• Body configuration
• Personal characteristics

• Performance success will most likely result from a combination of

factors: abilities, age, experience, practice, motivation, mood
A way to use abilities in motor performance

• Task analysis approach to determine which movement components to

emphasize during instruction
Task Analysis
• The breaking down of a skill into its component parts and
corresponding underlying abilities
• Through task analysis, we can understand skill requirements better
• Then we can identify a learner’s strengths and weaknesses and modify
instruction to help them acquire the skill
Task Analysis Example
Summary on abilities

• People differ in their abilities

• Research supports fundamental abilities
• There exists a number of independent fundamental abilities
• Different combinations of these abilities underlie motor performance
• Some abilities play dominant roles in task performance while others
are secondary
• Some abilities may be important for a number of different tasks
Learning vs. Motor Learning
• Learning is a relatively permanent change in behavior
due to practice, or the process of acquiring knowledge
about the world.
• Motor learning: a set of processes associated with
practice leading to a relatively permanent change in
the capacity for skilled actions.
Motor Learning

• Motor learning is the understanding of acquisition

and/or modification of movement.
• As applied to patients, motor learning involves the
reacquisition of previously learned movement skills that
are lost due to pathology or sensory, motor, or cognitive
impairments. This process is often referred to as
recovery of function.
Concepts of Motor Learning

• Learning is a process of acquiring the capacity for skilled action

• Learning results from experience or practice
• Learning cannot be measured or observed directly; it is inferred
from behavior
• Learning produces relatively permanent changes in behavior;
short term change is not learning)
Motor Performance  Motor Learning
• Motor Performance is the temporary change in motor behavior seen
during a practice session. e. g. A patient learns how to shift more
body weight over the weaker leg at the end of the therapy session.
However, the patient still bears more weight on the unaffected leg at
the next visit to PT. Learning has not occurred.
• Performance may be influenced by many other variables, e.g. fatigue,
level of learning/skills, anxiety, motivation or manual guidance
given to the learner
• Motor Learning is a relatively permanent change in motor behaviors
that are measured after a retention period and only result from
practice.
Forms of motor learning
Nondeclarative (Implicit) Learning:
Non-Associative Learning

A single stimulus is given repeatedly and the nervous system learns

about the characteristics of the stimulus

Two types
Habituation – a reduction in the strength of response to a stimulus
across repeated presentations.
Sensitization – an increase in the strength of response to a stimulus
across repeated presentations.
Nondeclarative (Implicit) Learning:
Associative Learning

Classical Conditioning

Explore the world to identify the relationships between one’s body and the
environment is a critical task for patients with movement problems.
Associating a weak, ineffective (unconditioned-U) stimulus with a strong,
effective (conditioned-C) stimulus to produce a desired response (R)
• e.g. Verbal cues (U) coupled with manual guidance (C) to help a patient make the
movement (R)
• Patients are more likely to learn if the associations are relevant and meaningful to
them
Nondeclarative (Implicit) Learning:
Associative Learning

Operant Conditioning
• learn to associate a certain response, from among many that we have, with a
consequence; trial and error learning

Therapists use positive feedback(“Good job!”) to reinforce the successful

accomplishment of a task
• Neural circuits involved in operant conditioning
• Cerebellum for movements
• Amygdala for emotions
• Premotor areas for associating sensory events with a specific movement (“Mirror
Neurons”)
Declarative (Explicit) Learning

• Require attention, awareness, and reflection

• Results in knowledge or facts (e.g. objects, places, events) that can be
consciously recalled and expressed in declarative sentences, e.g. “1st I move to
the edge of chair. 2nd I lean forward and stand up”; instruction from PT; mental
rehearsal; motor imagery.

With declarative learning, motor tasks can be practiced in a different way, e.g.
athlet mental rehearsal before the competition
Neural circuits involved in declarative learning
• Sensory association cortices
• Medial temporal lobe
• Hippocampus
Declarative (Explicit) Learning
• Practice can transform declarative into procedural or nondeclarative
knowledge

• e.g. a patient first learns to stand up may verbally repeat the instruction; after
repeated practice, the patient may be able to stand up without instruction
• Processes of declarative learning: encoding  consolidation
storage retrieval
Procedural Learning
• Does NOT require attention, awareness, or other higher cognitive
processes
• One automatically learns the rules for moving, i.e. movement schema
• Learning requires repeating a movement continuously under a variety
of situations
• Patients with damage to cortex (e.g. dementia) can still 
performance
Fitts and Posner Three Stage Model: Cognitive
stage

• Learner activities
• Learn what to do
• Learn about the task and goals
• Require high degree of attention
• Select among alternative strategies
• Performance may be more variable
• Fast improvement in performance
• Develop a motor program
Fitts and Posner Three Stage Model:
Associative Stage

• Learner activities
• Refine the skills
• Refine a particular movement strategy
• Performance is less variable and more consistent
• Cognitive monitoring decreases
• Improve the organization of the motor program
Fitts and Posner Three Stage Model:
Autonomous Stage

• Learner activities
• Become proficient, save energy
• Attention demands are greatly reduced
• Movements and sensory analysis begin to become automatic
• Able to perform multiple tasks, scan the environment
• Ability to detect own errors improves
How to Measure Learning?

• To separate the relatively permanent effects of learning from the

transient effect of practice, learning can be measured using retention or
transfer designs.

1.Test the subject after a retention interval, typically >= 24 hr

2.Choose the same task (retention test) or a variation of the task (transfer
test)(e.g. different speed or lighting conditions for walking)
Practice Level: How Much?

• Animal Studies
• 9,600 retrievals over 4 week period (Nudo, 1996)
• 7,000 trials of food catching in 5 weeks (Pavlides, 1993)
• Humans?
• Dose-response log-linear relationship
• Are patients getting enough practice?
Feedback (FB)
• FB is all the sensory information that is available as a results of a
movement
• Types by mode of delivery
• Intrinsic (e.g. proprioception)
• Extrinsic (e.g. instruction from examiner)
• Types of FB by information provided
• Knowledge of results (KR)
• Knowledge of performance (KP)
Knowledge of Performance (KP)

• Information about the movement patterns

• Usually intrinsic but can also be extrinsic
• Proprioception, Biofeedback, video recording, verbal instruction (e.g.
“Your elbow was too low.”)
Knowledge of Results (KR)

• Information about the result or outcome of the movement in terms of

the goal
• Verbal instruction (e.g. “You were off the target.”), proprioception
(e.g. feeling loss of balance during a fall)
Characteristics of Good Feedback

• Timing
• Allow some time to reflect between trials
• Summary FB
• Summary FB after a few trials works better than after every trial
• Give more frequent summary feedback (e.g. after every 5 trials) for
complex tasks than for simple tasks
Characteristics of Good Feedback

• Accuracy
• Positively reinforce correct performance
• Augmented (extrinsic) Feedback
• Video/visual of movement patterns alone does not help; need to provide
error-correcting cues as well
• AVOID VERBAL BOMBARDMENT
• Can be given concurrently or afterwards
Practice Conditions
• Mental Practice
• The same neural circuits producing the movement are also active during
mental practice
• Can produce large positive effects on performance of the task
• Physical + mental practice produces the best learning outcome
Practice Conditions

• Action Observation
• Reorganization of the primarily
motor cortex in patients with
stroke after observation of the
desired action + motor training,
but not observation of irrelevant Mirror neuron system: Inferior
movement + motor training parietal lobule (IPL), Ventral
• Implications for patients with premotor cortex (PMv), inferior
poor motor ability frontal gyrus (IFG).
Garrison, 2010
Practice Conditions

Mirror neurons found in the premotor and parietal cortex respond not
only during action execution, but also during observation of actions
being performed by others. Thus, the motor system may be activated
without overt movement. Rehabilitation of motor function after stroke
is often challenging due to severity of impairment and poor to absent
voluntary movement ability. Methods in stroke rehabilitation based on
the mirror neuron system—action observation, motor imagery, and
imitation—take advantage of this opportunity to rebuild motor
function despite impairments, as an alternative or complement to
physical therapy.
Voluntary Movements
Voluntary movement often represents complex motor tasks that are accomplished in seemingly
effortless fashion, with no thought given to the muscle groups and joints that participate.

Voluntary movement differs from reflexes in several important ways:

1. Voluntary movement is governed by conscious planning

2. It is organized around performance of a specific task

3. Sensory stimuli do not dictate the resulting movement, although they guide the specified task

4. Task performance becomes more efficient with experience

5. Voluntary movement can be initiated internally without a sensory stimulus trigger.

Sensory inputs guide voluntary
movement through
feed-back and feed-forward
mechanisms
Example of feedback and feedforward movement control:
catching a falling ball

Visual input provides feed-forward control of the task enabling us to:

1) Position hand under where ball is anticipated to fall

2) Partially stiffen joints in anticipation of ball’s impact on hand

Somatosensory and proprioceptive inputs provide feed-back control

used to grasp ball.

Some aspects of feedback control involve task-specified

programming of spinal reflexes.

FCR: flexor carpi radialis

ECR: extensor carpi radialis
 Processing of a motor task begins with an internal representation
Of the desired result of movement

Example 1: Handwriting is similar style regardless of limb used

to write.
We write text to conform to an internally preimaged style
template
Processing of a motor task begins with an internal representation
Of the desired result of movement

Example 2: reaching is a straight-line task, regardless of

direction and muscles/joints required.
We program the direction and endpoint of task, and use
sensory input during task for guidance correction
Processing of a motor task begins with an internal representation
Of the desired result of movement

Example 3: speed of reaching is

pre-scaled to the distance of target
The endpoint is built into the
premotor program.
Efficiency of executing motor task improves with practice
(learning)

Both explicit and implicit memory are components of

motor learning
Improved efficiency in reaching task is form of implicit
learning
Motor Control and Learning

Central Pathways:

The somatic nervous system controls all voluntary muscular systems within the body.
Cortical Motor Structure

somatosensation
Motor
Eye movements Planning

Spatial
stuff for
movement

Abstract
Planning
Hierarchy: planning Planning
& execution
Execution
Hierarchy: planning
& execution

The planning stage: When a conscious decision is

made to perform a specific movement, information is
relayed from the frontal lobes to motor association
areas. These areas in turn relay the information to the
cerebellum and basal nuclei.
Hierarchy: planning
& execution

Movement: As the movement begins, the motor

association areas send instructions to the primary motor
cortex. Feedback from the basal nuclei and cerebellum
modifies those commands, and output along the
conscious and subconscious pathways directs involuntary
adjustments in position and muscle tone.
Summary of somatic motor control

Information goes from the basal nuclei and cerebellum back to the cerebral cortex to constantly monitor position
and muscle tone. Cerebellum is critical for integrating desired task and sensory inputs into motor planning and
execution. Cerebellum is a major site for learning within motor circuits. Basal ganglia control muscle tone
(readiness) and execution of rapid motor tasks

Thalamus
Controls reflexes associated with visual and auditory stimuli
Hypothalamus
Responds to hunger, thirst, and sexual activity
Pons
Regulates the rhythmic breathing patterns
Medulla oblongata
Alters the breathing patterns
Brain stem
Controls simple reflexes
Spinal cord
Controls simple reflexes
Comparison of motor planning and execution

Planning AND Execution

Comparison of motor planning and execution

Execution but minimal planning

Comparison of motor planning and execution

Planning but no execution

Remapping of motor cortex
Remapping of motor cortex following lesion is influenced by experience in the weeks after injury

Profound neurological implications for role of physical therapy following brain injury

Experiment-induced focal stroke affecting much of

Hand/digit region of motor cortex

No physical therapy for hand Physical therapy for hand

~ 1 month

remaining hand representation in remaining hand representation spared

motor cortex lost and more cortex recruited
(converted to arm/shoulder (converted from arm/shoulder
representation) representation)
loss of grasping capacity grasping capacity restored