In everyday life, the human body performs a wide range of movements that become functional thanks to repetition They automate They become movement habits. These skills allow you to perform everything from basic activities like walking, writing, or driving, to specialized tasks like playing an instrument, playing a sport, or learning rehabilitation techniques after an injury.
Change from one Motor skill The intuition of a newly learned pattern is often more complex than usually assumed. A recent study on Johns Hopkins Universitypublished in JNeurosci And it spreads Neuroscience Societyreveals that People tend to make mistakes when switching between familiar and new movements because they are stuck in the previous pattern. Instead of adapting to change.
This finding provides essential information about the challenges of learning and combining physical skills in areas ranging from sports practice to motor recovery.
Difficulties in transitioning between motor skills don’t just happen in the lab. Many people who learn to drive a car with an automatic transmission experience setbacks when shifting to a manual transmission, and vice versa, due to the acquired habit of using the left foot for the clutch or leaving it motionless, as appropriate.
Something similar happens when you try to practice a different swimming style than usual: the characteristic movements of the front crawl can interfere with the backstroke technique and cause errors. In dance, those who have difficulty memorizing new choreography find that their bodies respond first to old steps, making it difficult to incorporate changes.
During rehabilitation after injury or surgery, adapting to walking or arm movements requires weeks of training and incredible perseverance. The challenge is not to automatically return to the previous gesture, even if it is no longer effective or appropriate.
The team is led by Kahori Keita The researchers analyzed thirty-five volunteers – 23 men and 12 women – who replaced an already mastered motor skill with one they had recently acquired, both associated with different visual-motor mappings.
The results showed an increase in errors immediately after switching from one skill to another. According to Neuroscience SocietyThese failures did not arise from poor implementation of the new movement, but from… Tendency to maintain the previous patterneven when it no longer fits.
Kahori Keita He explained that errors appeared when moving from intuitive to new, and in the opposite direction: “The researcher said that people committed similar mistakes when switching from intuitive to new skill, as is the case when moving from new to intuitive skill.”
To delve deeper into this phenomenon, the study included a second group that learned two completely new motor skills. In these cases, the difficulty of alternating between them was greater in the early stages, which indicates this Familiarity with both models increases the complexity of change.
the Neuroscience Society He explained that although the initial hurdles were noticeable, continuous training over several days helped participants exchange skills with less margin of error. Persistence in training has allowed us to reduce failures when changing movement patterns, which has a direct impact on the way motor memory is consolidated and progress is made in physical learning.
The study concluded that the main difficulty in switching skills lies in the tendency to repeat the previous pattern, and not in the inability to remember or implement the new pattern. the Neuroscience Society He notes that these findings open new questions about the way memory stores and retrieves motor patterns, which may facilitate mastery of complex movements in the future. With more skill and efficiency.
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