title: Why professional athletes need a prolonged period of warm-up and other peculiarities of human motor learning.
abstract: Professional athletes involved in sports that require the execution of fine motor skills must practice for a considerable length of time before competing in an event. Why is such practice necessary? Is it merely to warm-up the muscles, tendons, and ligaments, or does the athlete's sensorimotor network need to be constantly recalibrated? In this article, the authors present a point of view in which the human sensorimotor system is characterized by: (a) a high noise level and (b) a high learning rate at the synaptic level (which, because of the noise, does not equate to a high learning rate at the behavioral level). They argue that many heuristics of human skill learning, including the need for a prolonged period of warm-up in experts, follow from these assumptions.
authors.affiliation: McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, USA. ajemian@mit.edu
authors.forename: Robert
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Ajemian
authors.forename: Alessandro
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: D'Ausilio
authors.forename: Helene
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Moorman
authors.forename: Emilio
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Bizzi
mesh_terms: D001245:Association Learning; D056352:Athletes; D054874:Athletic Performance / Q000502:physiology*; D002540:Cerebral Cortex / Q000502:physiology; D003198:Computer Simulation; D006801:Humans; D008959:Models, Neurological; D009048:Motor Skills / Q000502:physiology; D009068:Movement / Q000502:physiology; D009132:Muscles / Q000294:innervation / Q000502:physiology; D058765:Neurofeedback; D011214:Practice, Psychological; D011597:Psychomotor Performance / Q000502:physiology*; D013598:Systems Theory; D013647:Task Performance and Analysis