Choose to move: The motivational impact of autonomy support on motor learning

Lewthwaite, Rebecca; Chiviacowsky, Suzete; Drews, Ricardo; Wulf, Gabriele

doi:10.3758/s13423-015-0814-7

Cited by 143 publications

(151 citation statements)

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“…Importantly, even giving individuals choices that are incidental to the motor task has been demonstrated to have a positive effect on the learning of that task (Lewthwaite, Chiviacowsky, & Wulf, 2015). In one experiment, allowing participants to choose the color of golf balls they were putting led to more effective task learning than a yoked condition.…”

Section: Incidental Choicesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Optimizing performance through intrinsic motivation and attention for learning: The OPTIMAL theory of motor learning

2016

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Effective motor performance is important for surviving and thriving, and skilled movement is critical in many activities. Much theorizing over the past few decades has focused on how certain practice conditions affect the processing of task-related information to affect learning. Yet, existing theoretical perspectives do not accommodate significant recent lines of evidence demonstrating motivational and attentional effects on performance and learning. These include research on (a) conditions that enhance expectancies for future performance, (b) variables that influence learners' autonomy, and (c) an external focus of attention on the intended movement effect. We propose the OPTIMAL (Optimizing Performance through Intrinsic Motivation and Attention for Learning) theory of motor learning. We suggest that motivational and attentional factors contribute to performance and learning by strengthening the coupling of goals to actions. We provide explanations for the performance and learning advantages of these variables on psychological and neuroscientific grounds. We describe a plausible mechanism for expectancy effects rooted in responses of dopamine to the anticipation of positive experience and temporally associated with skill practice. Learner autonomy acts perhaps largely through an enhanced expectancy pathway. Furthermore, we consider the influence of an external focus for the establishment of efficient functional connections across brain networks that subserve skilled movement. We speculate that enhanced expectancies and an external focus propel performers' cognitive and motor systems in productive "forward" directions and prevent "backsliding" into self-and non-task focused states. Expected success presumably breeds further success and helps consolidate memories. We discuss practical implications and future research directions.Keywords Motivation . Attentional focus . Self-efficacy . Positive affect . Dopamine . Motor performance Skilled movement is fundamental to surviving and thriving in the world and the basis as well for many of the highest human endeavors and cultural achievements, from sport to art to music. How people learn and relearn movement skills has been addressed from a number of disparate scientific perspectives and levels of analysis, including behavioral, social cognitive, neurophysiological, and neurocomputational. In part, differences in assumptions, scientific terminology and philosophy, as well as methodological approaches have made scholarly rapprochement challenging, but we see the end goal of optimizing motor learning as important. We suggest that it may be valuable to bring recent insights from various approaches together to identify a coherent way forward that can result in optimized learning from humans' earliest encounters with new motor skills to the lifelong development of motoric expertise.It is typically considered time to look afresh at dominant theories in a field when the accumulating evidence suggests that old frameworks cannot account for substantial new insights an...

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Section: Incidental Choicesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Optimizing performance through intrinsic motivation and attention for learning: The OPTIMAL theory of motor learning

2016

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“…Motor learning is enhanced when children are presented with many options and are given opportunities to make choices [34,35]. In addition, increasing the number of practice trials and time on task further increases the extent of motor learning [36,37].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Learning better by repetition or variation? Is transfer at odds with task specific training?

et al. 2017

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ObjectiveTransfer of motor skills is the ultimate goal of motor training in rehabilitation practice. In children with Developmental Coordination Disorder (DCD), very little is known about how skills are transferred from training situations to real life contexts. In this study we examined the influence of two types of practice on transfer of motor skills acquired in a virtual reality (VR) environment.MethodOne hundred and eleven children with DCD and their typically developing (TD) peers, aged 6–10 years (M = 8.0 SD = 1.0) were randomly assigned to either variable (n = 56) or repetitive practice (n = 55). Participants in the repetitive practice played the same exergame (ski slalom) twice weekly for 20 minutes, over a period of 5 weeks, while those in the variable group played 10 different games. Motor skills such as balance tasks (hopping), running and agility tasks, ball skills and functional activities were evaluated before and after 5 weeks of training.ResultsANOVA repeated measures indicated that both DCD and TD children demonstrated transfer effects to real life skills with identical and non-identical elements at exactly the same rate, irrespective of the type of practice they were assigned to.ConclusionBased on these findings, we conclude that motor skills acquired in the VR environment, transfers to real world contexts in similar proportions for both TD and DCD children. The type of practice adopted does not seem to influence children’s ability to transfer skills acquired in an exergame to life situations but the number of identical elements does.

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Lewthwaite et al (2015) reported that the learning benefits of exercising choice (i.e., their self-controlled condition) are not restricted to task-relevant features (e.g., feedback). They found that choosing one's golf ball color (Exp.

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confidence: 99%

“…To account for the learning advantages of self-controlled practice conditions, two (competing) explanations are generally adopted by researchers. On the one hand, some researchers have argued that having choice or control is intrinsically rewarding and satisfies the basic psychological needs of autonomy and/or competence, which in turn enhances motor learning (Chiviacowsky, 2014;Lewthwaite, Chiviacowsky, Drews, & Wulf, 2015;. On the other hand, the learning advantages have been suggested to be predominantly driven by the learner's ability to engage in performance-dependent strategies (e.g., error estimation) that serve to reduce the uncertainty regarding task performance (Carter, Carlsen, & Ste-Marie, 2014;Carter, Rathwell, & Ste-Marie, 2016;Chiviacowsky & Wulf, 2005;Grand et al, 2015;Hansen, Pfeiffer, & Patterson, 2011;Huang, Shadmehr, & Diedrichsen, 2008).…”

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“…These explanations are often referred to as the motivational-influences perspective and the information-processing perspective, respectively (see both Carter et al, 2014, andSanli et al, 2013). To date, the learning benefits of choice for motor-skill learning have predominantly been found with choices that are relevant to learning a given motor task; however, these advantages were recently extended to choices that are irrelevant to the to-be-learned task (Lewthwaite et al, 2015). Lewthwaite and colleagues (2015) found that allowing participants to choose their golf ball color (Exp.…”

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Not all choices are created equal: Task-relevant choices enhance motor learning compared to task-irrelevant choices

Carter

Ste-Marie

2017

Psychon Bull Rev

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Lewthwaite et al. (2015) reported that the learning benefits of exercising choice (i.e., their self-controlled condition) are not restricted to task-relevant features (e.g., feedback). They found that choosing one's golf ball color (Exp. 1) or choosing which of two tasks to perform at a later time plus which of two artworks to hang (Exp. 2) resulted in better retention than did being denied these same choices (i.e., yoked condition). The researchers concluded that the learning benefits derived from choice, whether irrelevant or relevant to the to-be-learned task, are predominantly motivational because choice is intrinsically rewarding and satisfies basic psychological needs. However, the absence of a group that made task-relevant choices and the lack of psychological measures significantly weakened their conclusions. Here, we investigated how task-relevant and task-irrelevant choices affect motor-skill learning. Participants practiced a spatiotemporal motor task in either a task-relevant group (choice over feedback schedule), a task-irrelevant group (choice over the color of an arm-wrap plus game selection), or a no-choice group. The results showed significantly greater learning in the task-relevant group than in both the task-irrelevant and no-choice groups, who did not differ significantly. Critically, these learning differences were not attributed to differences in perceptions of competence or autonomy, but instead to superior error-estimation abilities. These results challenge the perspective that motivational influences are the root cause of self-controlled learning advantages. Instead, the findings add to the growing evidence highlighting that the informational value gained from task-relevant choices makes a greater relative contribution to these advantages than motivational influences do.

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Choose to move: The motivational impact of autonomy support on motor learning

Cited by 143 publications

References 46 publications

Optimizing performance through intrinsic motivation and attention for learning: The OPTIMAL theory of motor learning

Optimizing performance through intrinsic motivation and attention for learning: The OPTIMAL theory of motor learning

Learning better by repetition or variation? Is transfer at odds with task specific training?

Not all choices are created equal: Task-relevant choices enhance motor learning compared to task-irrelevant choices

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