The organization of multiple motor memories

The historical literature on sensorimotor learning has focused on how we adapt to a single perturbation. This framing yielded influential state-space formulations of adaptation, but fails to capture the ecological demands faced by biological learners: the need to construct, select, and maintain a repertoire of motor memories tailored to diverse tools and environments. Recent research has shifted the focus toward frameworks based on contextual inference, in which the governing context is not directly observable and must instead be inferred from sensory cues, motor errors, and the statistics of context transitions. This perspective provides a unified account of how motor memories are created, expressed, and updated over time, and it delineates key open problems for future work: elucidating how motor memories are organized into hierarchical or compositional structures, how continual learning can proceed without overwriting existing memories, and determining how different training curricula shape the acquisition and retention of motor memories.