Learning to Move and Plan like the Knight: Sequential Decision Making with a Novel Motor Mapping

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Science
• Neuroscience
• Motor Control

Background:

• Complex skill acquisition involves both motor learning and multi-step planning.
• These processes are often studied in isolation, yet likely interact during learning.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the interaction between motor learning and sequential decision-making.
• To assess how learning an arbitrary motor mapping impacts planning capabilities.

Main Methods:

• Participants performed a sequential decision-making task with a novel, arbitrary motor mapping (keyboard to Knight's move).
• Computational modeling was used to analyze learning rates and planning strategies.
• Two experiments examined performance with and without integrated planning.

Main Results:

• Learning the motor mapping improved subsequent planning performance, indicating enhanced state transition learning.
• Integrating mapping learning into planning captured performance variations across different planning horizons.
• Performance decreased with longer planning horizons, suggesting a limited planning depth (approx. 3 steps).

Conclusions:

• Motor learning enhances the flexibility and efficiency of planning.
• Working memory constraints likely limit planning horizon, leading to skill chunking in complex tasks.
• Findings offer insights into the cognitive mechanisms underlying complex skill acquisition.