Summary: A recent study from Johns Hopkins University reveals that people commonly struggle to switch between familiar motor behaviors and newly learned movement patterns, producing predictable mistakes. Even when instructed to change, volunteers often defaulted to the prior movement strategy, highlighting how strongly motor habits persist. The research also shows that switching between two newly acquired skills is particularly challenging at first but improves with training over days, indicating that motor learning includes both acquiring new actions and learning to transition between them smoothly.
Researchers found that the difficulty of switching is not simply due to poor execution of a new movement, but to the continued use of the pre-switch policy. Over time and with repeated practice, participants became better at retrieving and performing the appropriate skill after a switch. These findings illuminate a core constraint in motor learning and suggest directions for improving training and rehabilitation programs that require rapid changes between movement strategies.
Key Facts
- Persistent Motor Habits: Errors often occur because people continue applying the movement pattern they used before the switch.
- New Skills Are Harder: Switching between two recently learned motor skills produces higher initial costs than switching between an intuitive skill and a new one.
- Practice Improves Switching: Repeated training reduces switch-related errors and strengthens the ability to flexibly retrieve the correct motor policy.
Source: SfN
In a paper published in the Journal of Neuroscience, Kahori Kita and colleagues at Johns Hopkins University investigated how people switch between an intuitive motor skill and a newly learned movement mapped to a novel visuomotor rule. The study measured how often and why errors occur immediately after participants switched from one mapping to another.
Participants frequently made errors on trials that followed a switch between mappings. The authors determined these errors were not primarily caused by difficulty implementing the new movement or failing to recall it; instead, errors reflected persistence of the pre-switch movement policy. As the authors note, people made comparable errors whether they switched from the intuitive mapping to the new skill or from the new skill back to the intuitive one.
A subgroup of participants learned a second novel motor skill so that researchers could test switching between two recently acquired strategies. For these individuals, switching was initially even more difficult than switching between an intuitive and a new mapping. With additional practice over subsequent sessions, however, performance improved and switch-related errors decreased. This demonstrates that while switching between newly learned skills is demanding, repetition facilitates flexible retrieval and selection of the appropriate motor policy.
Together, the results highlight switching as a fundamental challenge in motor learning. Acquiring a new movement is only part of the process—efficiently alternating between different learned behaviors is also crucial. The authors emphasize the importance of training paradigms that not only teach new actions but also rehearse transitions between actions to reduce switch costs.
Key Questions Answered:
A: Because they often persist with the movement pattern they used immediately before the switch, producing predictable errors on the first post-switch trials.
A: Yes. Switching between two newly learned skills shows a larger initial cost than switching between an intuitive skill and a newly learned one, although practice reduces that cost.
A: They show that a key aspect of motor learning is not only forming new movement representations but also learning to retrieve and switch between them reliably; repetition and targeted practice improve this flexibility.
About this neuroscience research news
Author: SfN Media
Source: SfN
Contact: SfN Media – SfN
Image: The image is credited to Neuroscience News
Original Research: Closed access.
“Switching Between Newly Learned Motor Skills” by Kahori Kita et al., Journal of Neuroscience
Abstract
Switching Between Newly Learned Motor Skills
Research on cognitive flexibility highlights a temporary cost when switching between tasks. This study asked whether comparable switch costs exist for motor skills. The investigators tested whether participants could transition between a newly learned skill tied to a novel visuomotor mapping and an existing skill tied to an intuitive mapping.
The sample included 35 participants (23 males and 12 females). Participants showed increased errors on trials immediately following a mapping switch. Analysis indicated that these errors were driven by persistence of the pre-switch policy rather than by failures in implementing or retrieving the post-switch policy accurately.
A subset of participants learned a second novel skill so that switching between two newly acquired mappings could be examined. Switching between these novel skills was especially challenging at first, but performance improved with continued training.
Overall, the findings indicate that switching between motor skills—particularly newly learned ones—can be difficult, and that repetition and targeted practice reduce switch costs and improve flexible retrieval of motor policies.
The authors suggest future work to probe how newly formed motor memories are stored and accessed, and how training protocols can better support transitions between learned movements in contexts such as sports, rehabilitation, and tool use.