Searching Strategies in Practice: The Role of Stability in the Performer-Task Interaction

Abstract Through the view of the search strategies approach to skill acquisition–and its dynamic systems theoretical background–non-local changes in behavior are expected to emerge through a process of decreased stability (increased variability) of the ongoing movement pattern as to allow exploration of new regions of the perceptual-motor workspace. However, previous studies have not found such relation; only in non-redundant tasks. We believe that such issue occurs because these previous studies have focused on the movement pattern variability while in redundant tasks the variability that matters is at the task space level. Therefore, we analyzed the data of 15 individuals that practiced a throwing task for five days in terms of their movement patterns and release parameters to test whether increased variability at the task level was predictive of non-local changes in practice. We found that, for non-local changes at both release parameters and movement pattern levels, performance and performance variability were significant predictors. We discuss these results highlighting that they support a strong assumption of the search strategies approach, corroborate to the dynamical systems view on motor learning, and pointing the lack of consideration of non-local changes in other theories of motor learning.