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The effect of instruction on motor skill learning.

Many motor skills are learned with the help of instructions. In the context of complex motor sequences, instructions often break down the movement into chunks which can then be practiced in isolation. Thus, instructions shape an initial cognitive representation of the skill, which in turn guides practice. Are there ways of breaking up a motor sequence that are better than others? If participants are instructed in a way that hinders performance, how much practice does it take to overcome the influence of the instruction? To answer these questions, we used a paradigm in which participants were asked to perform finger sequences as fast and accurately as possible on a keyboard-like device. In the initial phases of training, participants had to explicitly remember and practice 2-or 3-digit chunks. These chunks were then combined to form seven 11-digit sequences that participants practiced for the remainder of the study. Each sequence was broken up into chunks in a way that was either aligned or misaligned with the basic execution-level constraints. We found that misaligned chunk instruction led to an initial performance deficit compared to aligned instruction. Overall, instructions still influenced the temporal pattern of performance after 10 days of subsequent training, with shorter inter-press-intervals within a chunk compared to between chunks. However, for the misaligned instructed sequences, this temporal pattern was altered more rapidly, such that participants could overcome the induced performance deficit in the last week. In the end of training, participants found idiosyncratic, but inter-individually stable ways of performing each sequence.