Studying motor skills

KINESIOL 2MC3

Mike Carter, Ph.D.
cartem11@email.com

Department of Kinesiology | McMaster University

September 03 2025

Lecture objectives

  • Define motor skills and distinguish it from related concepts.

  • Describe four characteristics of motor skills.

  • Explain different taxonomies used to classify motor skills.

  • Identify and describe some common variables used to measure motor skill performance.

TAKE-HOME MESSAGE:
There are some foundational terms and concepts in the study of motor control and learning that often get used incorrectly in both everyday life and professional sports.

Motor skills are…

  • goal-directed and performed voluntarily
  • require movements of joints and body segments via muscular contractions
  • need to be learned (or relearned)

Motor skills vs reflexes

Wink

Blink

Motor skills are…

  • goal-directed and performed voluntarily
  • require movements of joints and body segments via muscular contractions
  • need to be learned (or relearned)

Motor skills vs abilities

  • relatively stable and enduring traits that are either genetically inherited or developed during growth and maturation
    • abilities are not easily modified through practice or experience
    • abilities underlie motor skills
    • e.g., reaction time, hand-eye coordination, dexterity

Motor skills are…

  • goal-directed and performed voluntarily
  • require movements of joints and body segments via muscular contractions
  • need to be learned (or relearned)

Motor skills vs movements

  • component parts of a skill that are observable and measurable

Why is it important to distinguish between motor skills and movements?

  • we learn motor skills, not movements
  • the movements that make up skills become adaptable to move successfully in our environment
  • movements and motor skills are assessed differently
    • motor skills are typically evaluated in terms of outcome
    • movements are typically evaluated in terms of how they are produced

A formal definition of motor skills

Skill consists in the ability to bring about some end result with maximum certainty and minimum outlay of energy, or of time and energy (Guthrie 1952)

Key ideas:

  • maximizing the certainty of goal achievement
  • minimizing the physical and mental costs of performance
  • minimizing the time needed

Motor skills

  • Even the most mundane of skills result from a complex interaction of cognitive, perceptual, and motor processes

  • There are three elements critical to almost any motor skills:

    • Perceiving the relevant environmental features
    • Deciding what to do, where to do it, and when to do it to achieve the goal
    • Producing movements that achieve the goal

Principles of motor skills

Motor equivalence

Principles of motor skills

Motor variability

Principles of motor skills

Motor consistency

Principles of motor skills

Motor modifiability

Classifying motor skills

Stability of the environment

Classifying motor skills

Temporal predictability

Classifying motor skills

  • Gentile (2000) identified the need to consider two additional factors for more precise classification

Measuring skilled motor performance

Measuring skilled motor performance

  1. OUTCOME MEASURES: measures that indicate the result of an action
    • may or may not be relative to some task goal
    • e.g., how fast a person ran 100 m
  1. PRODUCTION MEASURES: measures that indicate how the nervous, muscular, and/or skeletal systems function during an action
    • capture the performance characteristics and/or neural processes or correlates
    • e.g., limb kinematics

Bottom figure from Gallivan and Chapman (2014)

Some common performance outcome measures

  • time to complete a task
  • reaction time
  • amount of error in performing criterion movement
  • time on target / Time in balance
  • trials or repetitions to completion
  • number or percentage of errors
  • number of successful attempts
  • etc…

Some common performance production measures

  • displacement, velocity, acceleration, and/or jerk
  • joint angle, joint torque
  • muscle activity via electromyography (EMG)
  • neural activity using
    • electroencephalogram (EEG)
    • functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)
    • transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS)
  • etc…

Measuring skilled motor performance

  • error scores are a very common in motor control and learning
    • are calculated with respect to some task goal that can be in the spatial domain, temporal domain, or both
    • can compute error scores in a single dimension or in two dimensions depending on the task being used
    • important to use the appropriate type to ensure valid conclusions (Fischman 2015; Hancock et al. 1995)

Measuring skilled motor performance

  • time based measures are also quite common in motor control and learning research

  • help to understand action preparation and execution

Reaction time and movement time are relatively independent measures

  • reaction time does not predict movement time
  • movement time does not predict reaction time
  • the person with the fastest reaction time in a race may not be the person with the fastest race time
  • reaction time and movement time measure different aspects of human performance

Lecture objectives

  • Define motor skills and distinguish it from related concepts.

  • Describe four characteristics of motor skills.

  • Explain different taxonomies used to classify motor skills.

  • Identify and describe some common variables used to measure motor skill performance.

TAKE-HOME MESSAGE:
There are some foundational terms and concepts in the study of motor control and learning that often get used incorrectly in both everyday life and professional sports.

What questions do you have?

Next class: Decision-making I

References

Fischman MG. On the continuing problem of inappropriate learning measures: Comment on wulf et al.(2014) and wulf et al.(2015). Human Movement Science 42: 225–231, 2015.
Gallivan JP, Chapman CS. Three-dimensional reach trajectories as a probe of real-time decision-making between multiple competing targets. Frontiers in Neuroscience 8: 215, 2014.
Gentile AM. Skill acquisition: Action, movement, and neuromotor processes. In: Movement science: Foundations for physical therapy in rehabilitation, edited by Carr JH, Shepherd RH. Rockville, MD: Aspen, 2000, p. 774–783.
Guthrie ER. The psychology of learning. New York: Harper & Row, 1952.
Hancock GR, Butler MS, Fischman MG. On the problem of two-dimensional error scores: Measures and analyses of accuracy, bias, and consistency. Journal of Motor Behavior 27: 241–250, 1995.