Motor Skills Laboratory

Have you ever wondered how practicing with a partner or in a group would impact your own performance? Completing skills in shared environments can unintentionally influence the behaviours of people practicing together. One explanation for this influence is related to a hidden process in the brain that causes us to covertly imitate another’s action, which impacts how we then plan and execute our own movements. This study was conducted to test how partners influence each other when acquiring new skills and potential costs or benefits of these “hidden” imitation processes on motor learning. To do this, novice performers in golf were put into a shared practice context, where partners putted to different distance targets (one near and one far). Partners putted at the same time or took turns. Practicing alongside a partner impacted the other partner’s performance during practice, but this was not detrimental to overall learning when they were tested the next day on practised and unpractised target distances. More specifically, partners who putted to a near target showed a bias to overshoot their target when paired with a far target partner, more so than people who practised alone to the near target. Observing your partner make errors during practice could cause you to compensate during your putt or it may cause you to make the same mistake in your own shot. In the dyad group that took turns putting, there was increased “compensatory” error (through overshooting in their shot after observing their partner undershoot). As such, observing errors in your partner during breaks in physical practice can influence your own actions. For partners who performed at the same time, without breaks, this compensatory bias was not shown, probably because of the salience of one’s own error in comparison to the partner. The results from this study show that practicing with others can have short-term impacts on performance. While there are intended benefits of working alongside others, there are also some hidden influences that should be considered when designing practice.