Skilled motor control implies a low entropy of states but a high entropy of actions

TL;DR

This paper investigates skill mastery in control tasks, showing that successful control involves low variability in states but high variability in actions, supporting perceptual control theory.

Contribution

It provides empirical evidence that skilled control is characterized by low state entropy and high action entropy, contrasting with traditional routinization views.

Findings

Successful control correlates with decreased state variability.

Successful control correlates with increased action variability.

Results support perceptual control theory over routinization.

Abstract

The mastery of skills such as playing tennis or balancing an inverted pendulum implies a very accurate control of movements to achieve the task goals. Traditional accounts of skilled action control that focus on either routinization or perceptual control make opposite predictions about the ways we achieve mastery. The notion of routinization emphasizes the decrease of the variance of our actions, whereas the notion of perceptual control emphasizes the decrease of the variance of the states we visit, but not of the actions we execute. Here, we studied how participants managed control tasks of varying levels of complexity, which consisted in controlling inverted pendulums of different lengths. We used information-theoretic measures to compare the predictions of alternative theoretic accounts that focus on routinization and perceptual control, respectively. Our results indicate that the successful performance of the control task strongly correlates with the decrease of state variability and the increase of action variability. As postulated by perceptual control theory, the mastery of skills consists in achieving stable control goals by flexible means.