Control becomes habitual early on when learning a novel motor skill

Abstract

When people perform the same task repeatedly, their behavior becomes habitual, or inflexible to changes in the goals or structure of a task. While habits have been hypothesized to be a key aspect of motor skill acquisition, there has been little empirical work investigating the relationship between skills and habits. To better understand this relationship, we examined whether and when peoples behavior would become habitual as they learned a challenging new motor skill. After up to ten days of practice, we altered the structure of the task to assess whether participants would flexibly adjust their behavior or habitually persist in performing the task the way they originally learned. We found that participants behavior became habitual early in practice--after only two days--at which point they were still relatively unskilled. These data demonstrate that motor skills become habitual after relatively little training, but can nevertheless further improve with practice.