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Poster E in Poster Session E: Thursday, August 6, 10:30 am – 12:15 pm, Kimmel Center, Shorin & Rosenthal Rooms

How Are Continuous Motor Skills Learned and Represented

Maoxin Xia¹, Timothy Verstynen¹, Jonathan Tsay¹; ¹Carnegie Mellon University

Presenter: Maoxin Xia

Most real-world motor actions require skilled continuous coordination. Here, we investigated how continuous motor performance improves with practice and how learned skills are represented. We recruited a large sample of participants (N = 300) to perform a tracing task, systematically varying how far ahead participants could preview the trajectory (5%–100%) to control the extent of advanced planning. To dissociate general skill learning from trajectory-specific learning, participants repeatedly practiced a single trajectory while interleaved random trajectories served as a baseline. To probe whether learning benefited from the trajectory’s global structure, we introduced rotated versions of the trained trajectory. With practice, participants became faster and more accurate. These improvements reflected general gains that were similar across preview conditions, without evidence for an expanded planning horizon, alongside trajectory-specific gains that diminished as preview increased. When probed, we found transfer to rotated trajectories, indicating learning benefits from a global representation of trajectory structure. Together, these findings suggest that continuous skill learning reflects modest general improvements in planning and execution, but substantial trajectory-specific gains that benefit from improved predictions of upcoming movements grounded in the trajectory’s global structure.

Topic Area: Memory, Learning & Knowledge Structures