bySociety for Neuroscience

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain

In a newJNeuroscipaper, Kahori Kita and colleagues at Johns Hopkins University explored how people switch between intuitive motor skills they know and newly learned movement patterns.

Study volunteers frequently made errors switching between more innate movements and new ones. These errors were largely because people persistently stuck to themovement patternsthey used before the switch.

Kita notes, "People made similar errors when switching from the intuitive to the new skill, as when switching from the new skill to the intuitive one." A second group of people learned two new movement-based skills. It was initially even more difficult for these participants to switch between newly learned movements, but they improved at switching between skills with more training over a couple of days.

These findings suggest that switching between movement patterns is difficult, especially for newly learned motor skills. However,practiceimproves the ability to switch between movements.

The researchers hope to continue exploring how newly learnedmotor skillsare remembered and how these memories are retrieved to adeptly perform these movements later.

More information: Switching Between Newly Learned Motor Skills, JNeurosci (2025). DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1311-24.2025 Journal information: Journal of Neuroscience

Provided by Society for Neuroscience