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Motor Skills

What is a Motor Skill?

Motor skill development File photo | Credit: Aussie Child Care NetworkOpens in new window

Motor skills entail an extensive variety of human behaviors. Activities as diverse as walking across a street to driving on a busy highway, typing a letter to playing a musical instrument, or performing a triple axial in ice skating to crashing through the line in football are all examples of motor skills.

Motor skills cover a broad range of behaviors accomplished primarily through the coordination of limbs and body segments brought about through involvement of the musculature.

Motor skills are directed toward the accomplishment of specific environmental goals, and goal attainment is importantly dependent on movement.

Although any skilled behavior involves combinations of cognitive, perceptual, and motor processes in varying degrees of importance, motor skills refer to performance that is “muscular,” that is, where muscular activity is the primary determinant in goal attainment.

Features of Motor Skills

Motor skills are learned. Motor skills do not result from the activity of reflexes or inherent natural abilities—they must be learned.

Motor skills range from simple action easily learned, such as depressing a telegraph key on signal, to complex sports skills requiring lengthy periods of practice to master.

Folding these features into definitional form, we can offer the following expanded definition of a motor skill:

A motor skill is a learned, goal-directed activity accomplished primarily through muscular contributions to action and entailing a broad range of human behaviors.

This definition, referred to as the classic definition of motor skill, represents a categorical definition. This means that any activity or behavior so described is, by definition, a motor skill.

That is, it is a definition that circumscribes all behaviors considered motor skills, regardless of the quality of those behaviors.

In this sense, it is a definition of motor skill as a “thing.” This is a widely accepted definition pervasive in the literature and echoed by many authors over the years, so that we might label it as the classic definition of motor skills.

Definintg Motor Skills by the Characteristics of Skilled Performance

The classic definition of motor skills just presented highlights an important characteristic of skills—they can be improved! This has led many skill analysts to include in their definition of motor skill those features distinguishing relatively poor, or unskilled, performers from highly skilled performers. That is, the extent and quality of learning becomes an important aspect of how motor skill is defined.

A definition of motor skill in terms of the characteristics separating performers of various skill levels was offered in 1952 by Guthrie and has continued to influence the definition of motor skills to the present.

Guthrie posited that all motor skills consist of the ability to bring about some end result with maximum certainty and a minimum outlay of energy, or of energy and time.

There is intuitive appeal in Guthrie’s definition. In particular, it highlights the qualitative aspect of motor skills. That is, different individuals performing the same skill can exhibit varying quality of performance.

Specific in Guthrie’s definition are three featurs separating unskilled from skilled performers. (A comparison of Guthrie’s definition of skill with that of the classic definition is shown in Table X-1.)

Table X-1 Comparing Two Definitions of Motor Skill
Classic DefinitionGuthrie’s Definition
Defining characteristicsGoal-directed, learned behaviors accomplished primarily through contributions of the muscular systemMaximizes certainty of goal attainment while minimizing energy expenditure and movement time
Defining PerspectiveNature of the taskQuality of performance
Primary Question AddressedWhat behaviors constitute motor skills?What makes a person skillful?
  1.   Maximum certainty of goal achievement

An important quality of skill proficiency is the ability to achieve the task goal with a maximum of certainty. In laboratory research concerned with motor skill learning, certainty is measured by the reduction (change) in error measures over acquisition.

In sports settings, certainty is the primary determinant of skill. A kicker in football who misses all of his team’s attempted field goals, even if his kicking form is perfect, would not be considered skilled.

  1.   Minimum energy expenditure

For many motor skills, proficiency is achieved through the minimization of energy required for performance. The conservation of energy is essential to high-level performance in energy-demanding skills such as wrestling or cross-country running. In these activities, the skilled performer learns to reduce or eliminate unnecessary movement or physical exertion.

In addition to reductions in muscular forces through efficient regulation of the body’s energy producing systems, individuals also learn to minimize the mental demands required for task attainment. Performers come to produce skills in more automatic fashion, with less conscious attention directed toward movement organization, and are then more able to direct mental resources to other features of the performance or the environment.

  1.   Minimum movement time

In many motor skills, the quality of performance increases with reduced time (or increased speed) of movement. Skillful performers of such motor skills as volleyball, soccer, baseball, running, and swimming all benefit from increasing the speed of their movements. Success in some sport skills, such as sprinting, is almost entirely determined by the speed of motor acions.

It should be noted, however, that some motor performances are not improved as movement speed continues to increase. In skills requiring considerable movement accuracy, such as hammering a nail or hitting a baseball, too much speed can result in decreased performance success.

Attempting to hammer a nail too rapidly will result in misses (and perhaps a smashed finger or two), just as attempting to swing at a pitched baseball with maximum speed can result in a strike rather than a hit. These examples demonstrate one of the oldest principles in skill performance: the speed-accuracy trade-off.

Skill, Movements, and Abilities

The term movement is frequently used as a synonym for motor skill, as in “She has mastered the various movements required to be good at basketball.” Movements are not the same thing as motor skills, however, and the two terms should not be confused and used interchangeably.

Movements refer to the behavioral characteristics of bodily elements. The change in position of an individual limb or body segment is a movement.

Movements are the constituent parts of a skill. Motor skills are assembled through a collection of movementns organized together to manifest a complex action directed toward the accomplishment of a specific goal.

Further, a particular motor skill can be accomplished through a variety of different movements. The movements executed to run on an indoor running track, on a sandy beach, or on an incline are different, yet each contributes to the skill of running.

Ability is another term frequently used incorrectly to refer to motor skills. Abilities are stable and enduring traits that are genetically inherited.

Abilities can be thought of as the building blocks of motor skills, because they underlie the execution of movements and play a significant role in determining a person’s capacity to learn and perform motor skills. Examples of motor abilities are reaction time, hand-eye coordination, and speed of limb movement. (It should be noted that the term ability sometimes reflects specific theoretical assumptions, leading some contemporary theorists to disregard its use altogether.)

The Classification of Motor Skills

As is clear from our discussion in this literature, motor skills represent a diverse collection of movement behaviours.

Motor skills include activities as different as knitting and Olympic weight lifting, downhill skiing and brushing your teeth, or fly-fishing and ballet.

Such striking differences among the behaviours defined as motor skills can easily lead to confusion, especially when we wish to communicate about important similarities or differences among motor skills.

What is needed is a method of classifying motor skills based upon a limited number of relevant features that can provide for meaningful grouping as well as effective communication. In the study of motor skills, two methods of classification, one-dimensionalOpens in new window and two-dimensional systemsOpens in new window, are widely used.

Summary

Skills of many and varied types make up a majority of the activities comprising daily life. Depending upon the requisite capabilities most critical in accomplishing their goals, skills are classified into cognitive, perceptual, and motor domains.

Motor skills, as a separate domain of skill, are defined in two ways:

  • The classic definition of motor skills assumes a task perspective and defines motor skills as voluntary, goal-directed, learned behaviours accomplished primarily through contributions of the muscular-skeletal system.
  • Guthrie’s definition of motor skills assumes a performance perspective and defines motor skills as maximizing goal attainment while minimizing energy expenditures and movement time.

The study of motor skills comprises three componentsOpens in new window influencing performance, each of which plays a role in both facilitating and limiting performance capabilities:

  • Environment
  • Task
  • Person

Four aspects of skilled behaviourOpens in new window characterize all motor skills:

  • Motor equivalence
  • Motor variability
  • Motor consistency
  • Motor modifiability

Among the most persistent problems facing motor skill researchers, four in particular underscore differences in theoretical perspectives and are the most challenging to researchers:

  • The degrees of freedom problem
  • The perceptual-motor integration probem
  • The serial-order problem
  • The skill acquisition problem

Two systems for classifying motor skills are used today:

  • One-dimensional classification systems assume a task perspective and classify skills along a continuum. One-dimensional systems have been developed based upon the stability environmental features (closed vs. open), temporal predictability (discrete, serial, and continuous), and movement precision (fine vs. gross).
  • Gentile’s two-dimensional system classifies skills into 16 categories representing combinations of environmental demands and action requirements. The taxonomy is particularly useful for purposes of evaluating movement capabilities and planning instruction progressions when teaching motor skills.
See also:
  1. Adams, DL. (1999). “Develop better motor skill progressions with Gentile’s Taxonomy of Tasks,” Journal of Physical Education, Recreation, and Dance, 70(8), 35 – 38.
  2. Gentile, AM. (2000). “Skill acquisition: Action, movement, and neuromotor process.” In J Carr and R Shepherd (eds.), Movement Science: Foundations for Physical Therapy and Rehabilitation (pp. 111 – 188). Gaitherburg, MD: Aspen Publications.
  3. Sheridan, MR. (1984). “Planning and controlling simple movement.” In MM Smyth and AL. Wing (eds.), The Psychology of Movement (pp. 47 – 82). London: Academic Press.
  4. Wulf, G, and Shea, C. (2002). “Principles derived from the study of simple skills do not generalize to complex skills.” Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 9, 185 – 211.
  5. Haywood, KM, and Getchell, N. (2004). Life span motor development, 4th ed. Champaign, 1L: Human Kinetics.
  6. Lashley, KS. (1951). “The problem of serial order in behavior.” In LA Jeffress (ed.), Cerebral mechanisms in behavior: The Hixon symposium (pp. 112 – 136). New York: Wiley.
  7. Smyth, MM, and Haggard, P. (1999). “Movement and action: Introduction to the special topic,” British Journal of Psychology, 90(12), 243 – 246.
  8. Kelso, AS, Fuchs, A, Lancaster, R, Holroyd, T, Cheyne, D, and Weinberg, H. (1998). “Dynamical cortical activity in the human brain reveals motor equivalence.” Nature, 392, 814 – 818.
  9. Kramer, AF, Strayer, DL, and Buckley, J. (1990). “Development and transfer of automatic processes,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 16, 505 – 522.
  10. Jeannerod, M. (1994). “The representing brain: Neural correlates of motor intention and imagery.” Brain Behavior and Science, 17, 187 – 245.
  11. Guthrie, ER. (1952). The psychology of learning. New York: Harper & Row.
  12. Gentile, AM. (2002). “Skill acquisition: Action, movement, and the neuromotor processes.” In JH Carr and RB Shepherd (eds.), Movement science: Foundations for physical therapy in rehabilitation, 2nd ed. (pp. 111 – 188). Rockville, MD: Aspen Press.
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