Motor skill: Feedback, knowledge, and structural issues.

Abstract

Feedback processing and structural constraints on movement are discussed. For aiming movements of the hand, the time to process feedback has been generally overestimated. Visual information about the target and especially the hand is important as is the rapid processing of kinesthetic feedback. Skilled aiming movement is argued to be a product of tightly coupled efferent and afferent information within a sensorimotor system comprising the eyes, head and hand. In consideration of the relationship between knowledge and movement, production systems for motor skill should include constraints of musculoskeletal and neural structures as well as constraints of structure in environmental information. Motor skills entail integrated, structured sensorimotor systems. Accounts of motor skills might profitably include movement dynamics (in physical terms), the skill-specific knowledge base through which objectives are defined and the biological apparatus for realizing those objectives.