A Surprising Practice for Learning a New Movement

A paper published October 19 in Nature Human Behaviour reports that people improved at copying unfamiliar movement patterns after practicing rotated versions of them. Across 11 experiments, this kind of training produced improvements comparable to repeated practice on the original pattern. The researchers suggest that learning may involve grasping a movement’s structure—not only repeating the same physical motion. Read the study. (nature.com)

That’s an intriguing result, but a specific handwriting task is not a recipe for learning every skill. The useful growth question is narrower: what part of a skill’s structure might transfer when its surface details change?

For a skill you’re practicing, try one small variation, predict what will carry over, then compare your performance with the usual version. Keep what the evidence supports; revise what it doesn’t. Which skill would be worth testing this way?