The Steep Part of the Learning Curve: How Cognitive Strategies Shape Sensorimotor Skill Acquisition

Presented by Jordan A. Taylor, Department of Psychology, Princeton University

Since the seminal findings of Patient H.M., sensorimotor learning has been thought to reflect the outcome of a unitary implicit process. More recently, it has become clear that explicit, cognitive strategies play an important role in sensorimotor learning; however, they remain poorly understood. I will discuss our recent efforts to pin down the computational and neural underpinnings of these strategies. We find that strategies account for the lion’s share of performance improvements in sensorimotor learning tasks. They appear to rely on various processes associated with executive function, such as mental imagery and simulation, which are constrained by working memory capacity and computational processing limitations. What’s more, the process that we thought of as being emblematic of implicit learning, which gives rise to sensorimotor aftereffects, appears incapable of explaining sensorimotor learning even after long periods of training. As a consequence, we hypothesize that the strategies themselves are likely to become proceduralized over time or serve as the input to another implicit process, such as model-free reinforcement learning. This work suggests that we may need to rethink current theories of motor control and broaden the scope of the putative neural substrates thought to underlie sensorimotor skill acquisition to accommodate the important contribution of cognitive strategies.

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A casual lunch will be served following the presentation.