Lectures and seminars Cognitive Neuroscience Club: "How do we learn complex motor skills, from serving a tennis ball to playing the piano?"

Abstract

How do we learn complex motor skills, from serving a tennis ball to playing the piano? I propose that motor learning involves three fundamental processes: reasoning, understanding how our actions relate to outcomes; refinement, fine-tuning our movements and decisions to achieve our goals; and retrieval, recognising the situation and recalling what we have learned to guide action.

I will present evidence for this 3R framework from laboratory and real-world settings, outline future research into the brain mechanisms underlying each process, and explore how these insights could advance robotics, improve brain–machine interfaces, and enhance human performance.