Motor learning is the set of processes associated with practice that lead to relatively permanent changes in the capability for skilled movement. From learning to walk as infants to mastering a musical instrument as adults, motor learning shapes our physical interactions with the world. It involves the transition from effortful, attention-demanding performance to smooth, automatic execution — a process that depends on practice, feedback, and the development of internal models of body-environment dynamics.
Stages of Motor Learning
Fitts and Posner's (1967) three-stage model remains influential. In the cognitive stage, the learner develops a declarative understanding of the task, performance is variable and attention-demanding, and errors are frequent and large. In the associative stage, errors decrease, movements become more consistent, and the learner begins to develop error-detection capabilities. In the autonomous stage, performance is smooth, automatic, and relatively resistant to interference from concurrent tasks.
Practice and Feedback
The role of practice is central but its structure matters enormously. Distributed practice is generally superior to massed practice. Variable practice (practicing under varied conditions) produces better transfer than constant practice (practicing under identical conditions), consistent with Schmidt's schema theory. The contextual interference effect shows that random practice (interleaving different tasks) produces slower acquisition but better retention and transfer than blocked practice (practicing one task at a time).
The motor system develops internal models — neural representations of the body's dynamics and its interaction with the environment. Forward models predict the sensory consequences of motor commands, enabling rapid error correction and smooth movement. Inverse models compute the motor commands needed to achieve desired outcomes. The cerebellum is thought to play a central role in acquiring and maintaining these internal models, explaining why cerebellar damage produces coordination deficits and impaired motor learning.