The stages of motor learning

Fitts and Posner's stages and Bernstein's degrees of freedom: how a movement goes from discovery to automaticity.

The outline, topic by topic

Each topic is weighted the way the exam weighs it.

Cognitive stage: what is it?
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Fitts and Posner's first stage: the learner understands the task, makes many errors and thinks about every move.
At this stage, instructions must be simple and few.
A beginner tennis player keeps a stiff arm and locked wrist. How does Bernstein explain it?
- He freezes degrees of freedom to simplify control
- He releases degrees of freedom to move more fluidly
- He already exploits the passive forces of his arm
- He runs a movement that is already automatic
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He freezes degrees of freedom to simplify control
Stiffness is a normal stage, not a fault to fix at once.
Associative stage: what is it?
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Second stage: the movement stabilises, errors drop and the learner begins to correct them alone.
It can last a long time.
Why give few instructions to a beginner?
- At the cognitive stage, he already corrects his errors alone
- At the cognitive stage, attention is quickly overloaded
- At the cognitive stage, his movement is already automatic
- At the cognitive stage, he needs no information
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At the cognitive stage, attention is quickly overloaded
One or two instructions at a time are enough.
Autonomous stage: what is it?
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Third stage: the movement is automatic and frees attention for other things.
The basketball player dribbles while watching teammates.