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Optimizing Outcomes in Rehabilitation: Motor Learning Principles and Beyond: Summary
CASE STUDY 3: PRACTICE
Jill is a 25-year-old former college athlete who suffered grade two hamstring strain while preparing for a half marathon. Her rehabilitation program has been built around the principles of motor learning, emphasizing the importance of repetitive and focused practice. To address her goals, her therapist incorporates elements such as task practice, repetitive exercises, blocked and variable practice sessions, strategic rest intervals, and maintaining consistency in her routine. This approach not only aids in the physical recovery of her hamstring but also plays a pivotal role in rebuilding her confidence and running abilities.
Feedback Feedback is another element that plays a crucial role in improving motor performance and learning. Effective feedback is contingent on:
and targets, is beneficial for initially learning a skill but has the strongest tendency to foster dependency if overused. • Auditory feedback, like metronomes or music, emphasizes timing and is less likely to cause dependency. • Haptic feedback , which involves touch and somatic sensory information to guide movement, is the only form of feedback that gives real-time interaction information. However, it can also lead to dependency and passivity if it is overused. It is best during the initial learning phase.
• What information is provided • How the information is provided • When the information is provided
Feedback can be either prescriptive (how to correct an error) or descriptive (whether or not an error occurred). During initial training, prescriptive feedback tends to be more effective because it provides specific instructions on how to correct errors made during a task. Prescriptive feedback helps patients understand what they are doing wrong and offers guidance on how to make improvements. As learners progress to later stages of skill acquisition, descriptive feedback becomes more useful. This is because during the advanced stages, individuals have already developed a foundational understanding of the task and acquired the basic skills. Feedback can also be internal or external. Internal feedback is provided by a person’s own internal sensory systems and requires working sensory systems to process information quickly and accurately. External or augmented feedback can be visual, auditory, or haptic. • Visual feedback, such as watching someone’s movements or using markers
LEARNING TIP! External feedback can be
beneficial but can distract from the use of internal feedback and can be less efficient, requiring more cognitive resources than internal feedback.
Another approach to learning and skill acquisition involves combining different sensory modalities, such as visual and auditory or visual and haptic feedback. This is called multimodal feedback and is most helpful when learning a complex motor task. Multimodal feedback includes audiovisual and visuohaptic feedback.
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