Novice motor performance: better not to verbalize

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Motor Learning
• Neuroscience

Background:

• Offline verbalization is often assumed to enhance motor skill acquisition.
• The specific impact of verbalization on declarative versus procedural knowledge in motor learning remains unclear.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate whether verbalizing a motor experience influences subsequent performance.
• To determine if any influence originates from declarative or procedural knowledge using the explicit/implicit motor-learning paradigm.

Main Methods:

• Eighty non-golfers learned a golf-putting task, categorized by high error rates (explicit learning, declarative knowledge) or low error rates (implicit learning, procedural knowledge).
• Participants either verbalized their motor experience or completed an irrelevant verbal task.
• Performance on the golf-putting task was reassessed after the intervention.

Main Results:

• Verbalization did not improve novice motor performance.
• Overall putting performance was impaired after verbalization.
• Performance impairment was particularly pronounced in participants who learned explicitly (high error rates).

Conclusions:

• Verbalizing motor experiences does not enhance novice motor performance.
• Declarative knowledge, associated with explicit learning, is altered by verbalization.
• Procedural knowledge, associated with implicit learning, appears unaffected by verbalization.