Above: Bullseye is learning a new motor skill, the spanish step. He is in the cognitive stage, where the goal is only for him to raise the cued leg. It does not yet matter how high he raises his leg.
In my last post, I discussed some physical fitness aspects of horseback riding. I will certainly return to this topic in the future, as I only scratched the surface of a broad and important topic. However, in this post, I want to introduce another important aspect, which is motor skills and motor learning. When performing any movement, the mover must have the physical capability, i.e. strength, flexibility, and balance, but the mover must also know how to perform the movement or motor skill. You might hear coaches and instructors refer to muscle memory. What they are referring to is a movement pattern that a mover has performed enough times for the body to create a map stored in the brain that is easily accessed by the mover whenever they choose to perform the movement. We can create new maps and edit old ones through practice. This is known as motor learning. Understanding the process of motor learning is useful for training our bodies and the bodies of our horses. Therefore, I will dedicate a number of posts to the topic of motor control and motor learning.
The small piece of motor learning that I want to introduce in this post is the stages of motor learning. Understanding these stages will help you set realistic goals for you and your horse and guide your focus during training sessions. Learners in different stages will experience different challenges and need to acquire different aspects of a movement before they will progress to the next stage of learning.
The first stage of motor learning proposed by the Fitts and Posner model is the cognitive stage. In this stage, the learner is figuring out what to do and how to do it. Large errors are made and there is a lack of consistency between attempts. The learner is aware that they are doing something wrong, but is not sure how to fix it. This stage is referred to as the cognitive stage, because the learner must use a lot of cognition to perform the movement. They are thinking about everything they are doing. The goal in this stage is to learn the basic movement pattern. For example, if you were teaching a rider to post the trot, the goal would be to get them posting, not to get them posting on the correct diagonal or even in perfect rhythm. Simply rising and falling is the goal. The beginner may even begin by posting the walk rather than the trot. The idea is that they get the basic movement pattern.
The second stage is the associative stage. In this stage, the learner has the basics of the movement. Errors are smaller and there is more consistency between attempts. This stage is really about refining the movement. In this stage, the learner is able to identify some of the errors in their performance. According to Magill and Anderson, it is termed the associative stage, because the learner "associates environmental cues with the movements required to achieve the goal of the skill (Anderson & Magill, 2014, p. 274-275)." To return to our example of learning to post the trot, the rider would now be starting to associate when they should be doing certain aspects of the movement. An instructor teaching a student at this stage might tell them, "Rise and fall with the leg on the wall." This lets the student know that they should be leaving the saddle as the horse's outside shoulder comes up and returning to the saddle as it goes down. The environmental cue the rider is looking at in this case is the horse's front outside leg or shoulder. An important note about sensory cues is that learner's become reliant on them. Therefore, it is unwise to use cues during practice time that will be unavailable at performance time. Learners will actually have to relearn the skill without the sensory cue. An example of this would be if a rider always practiced in an arena with mirrors. They may start to rely heavily on the visual information provided by the mirror and have a decreased performance when riding in an arena without mirrors. Another example is training horses to take bigger steps using trot poles. When the trot poles are removed, the horses will likely return to taking the same size steps they were before they were introduced to the poles. Therefore, the increased length of step must be associated with another cue in order to produce it without the ground pole. It is also helpful for instructors to understand that providing environmental cues related to the goal of the movement is more helpful for students than providing cues related to body positions or kinematics. Focusing on the kinematics of the movement is correlated with decreased performance. Again returning to the posting trot, instruct the rider to allow the horse's movement to push them out of the saddle rather than telling them to extend at the hip joint.
The last stage is the autonomous stage, which is named such, because the movement has become automatic. Learners in this stage do not have to think about their movements. There is a lot of consistency between attempts and the learner is able to detect and correct many of their own errors. When we say something is "just like riding a bike," we are referring to the fact that riding a bike for most adults has become automated. Even though they have not ridden a bike in a long time, they can easily hop back on the bike and cycle without much thought to how they are doing it. This also demonstrates retention, which is a key characteristic of motor learning. The brain does not easily forget the motor programs it has created, especially ones it has used the most.
One point I want to make about motor learning is that errors are a part of it. Errors will be large and frequent in the first stage of learning and only start to dwindle with many more hours of practice. This is normal. It is important to allow both yourself and your horse to make errors throughout the learning process. These errors are important steps to learning. Don't be afraid of mistakes, unless they are dangerous. Placing pressure on yourself or your horse to not make mistakes is unnecessary and will only prevent learning.
The second point I want to make about errors is that beginners cannot identify them or correct them by themselves. Therefore, it is important for a rider to have someone provide feedback and it is important for a horse to have a trainer to provide feedback. The feedback should let the horse or rider know what their error was and how to correct it, but should not punish them for having made the error. Keeping emotion out of this feedback, allows the learner to focus on the skill rather than the instructor. Some instructors and trainers have chosen to use a clicker system for this reason. It removes the emotional aspect from providing feedback about performance. It's not necessary to use a clicker for this purpose, but it is one way. People and horses alike can read facial expressions as well, so the clicker will not completely remove emotion from the equation. Nonetheless, some trainers and instructors in many different disciplines have found a lot of success with this type of training.
As the mover progresses through the stages of learning, they will develop different movement strategies. The strategies adopted later in learning are generally more efficient than those used earlier. Sometimes there will be a drop in performance as a new strategy is adopted. Once the new strategy is fully adopted and the learner has adjusted, performance should increase past the point where the learner was prior to adopting the new strategy. Beginners usually freeze their degrees of freedom, while performing a new movement as a way to control the movement. As learners progress, their strategy usually changes to allow more degrees of freedom. In horseback riding, this is noticeable in a rider's seat. A beginner will try to lock their hips as they are riding. This makes it more difficult for them to follow the movement of the horse. Because this is a normal strategy for a beginner, it may not be beneficial for an instructor to attempt to correct this too early. Instead, the instructor may give the rider exercises that are more easily performed without more freedom at the hip. For example, posting the trot requires less freedom at the hip than sitting the trot. Successfully sitting the trot, requires the rider to follow the movement of the horse with their hips. This is just one example of how understanding the stages of motor learning can help us and our horses more easily learn new motor skills. The more instructors and trainers know about motor learning and motor control, the more they can exploit the process to improve the experience for horse and human alike.
References
Anderson, D., & Magill, R. (2014). Motor learning and control: concepts and applications (10th ed.).
New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.
