Related Experiment Video
Updated: Oct 8, 2025

Quantifying Learning in Young Infants: Tracking Leg Actions During a Discovery-learning Task
Published on: June 1, 2015
The ontogeny of efficient second-order action planning: The developing interplay of controlled and habitual processes
Saskia Melzel1, Markus Paulus1
1Department of Psychology, Ludwig Maximilians Universität München, 80802 Munich, Germany.
Abstract:
The ability to act efficiently plays an important role in everyday human life. The current study investigated efficient motor planning in 2- to 14-year-old children and adults (N = 246) in two different object manipulation tasks that involved everyday objects (a cup and a spoon). Importantly, we manipulated whether or not the efficient controlled grasp was incongruent with the habitual use of the object. We assessed to what extent participants planned their grasping action in an anticipatory controlled manner or relied on the habitual use of an object. We found the ability of efficient movement planning to be correlated between the two conceptually different tasks. Furthermore, the interplay of controlled and habitual processes of action control showed different developmental patterns for the two tasks and does not indicate a simple linear developmental trend. Thus, this study expands our knowledge on the ontogeny of efficient motor planning and highlights the developmental dynamics of the interplay of controlled and habitual processes in goal-directed action control.
Related Concept Videos
Hierarchy of Motor Control
Cognitive Learning
E. C. Tolman's theory of purposive behavior emphasizes that much behavior is goal-directed. He argued that to understand behavior, we must look at the entire sequence of actions leading to a goal. For instance, high school students study hard, not just due to past reinforcement but also to achieve the goal of getting into a good college.
Tolman introduced the idea that behavior is influenced by...
Automatic Processing and Automatic Social Behavior
High-Level and Low-Level Awareness
Purposive Learning
Schemata
Two types of schemata are:

