Switching between Newly Learned Motor Skills

Studies of cognitive flexibility suggest that switching between different tasks can entail a transient switch cost. Here, we asked whether analogous switch costs exist in the context of switching between different motor skills. We tested whether participants (23 males and 12 females) could switch between a newly learned skill associated with a novel visuomotor mapping and an existing skill associated with an intuitive mapping. Participants showed increased errors in trials immediately following a switch between mappings. These errors were attributable to persisting with the preswitch policy rather than imperfect implementation or retrieval of the postswitch policy. A subset of our participants further learned a second new skill. Switching between these two novel skills was initially very challenging but improved with further training. Our findings suggest that switching between newly learned motor skills can be challenging and that errors in the context of switching between skills are primarily attributable to perseveration with the wrong control policy.

• Publication year

  2025

• Venue

  Journal of Neuroscience

• Publication date

  2025-11-10

• Fields of study

  Medicine, Psychology

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1311-24.2025PMID 41213806PMCID PMC12696622
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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