Finding the Sweet Spot: An Evaluation of Metacognitive Judgements in Motor Based Learning

Abstract

Individuals make preconceived judgments about whether they have the ability or desire to complete a task prior to completing it. A novice will opt for learning to play Mary had a little lamb over learning Rhapsody in Blue. The need to identify a desirable level of difficulty for motor learning is important to promote engagement, enjoyment and longevity in motor skill development. However, we don't know what makes something difficult to learn or what causes one motor task to seem much harder than the next, even when the task is nearly identical. Previous literature suggests that you must perform the task first to determine the desirable level of difficulty, however this can be costly and dangerous. This study explores if people can make an accurate similarity and difficulty judgment for motor learning, and whether this metacognitive assessment of motor learning is accurate to predict performance. I examine how metacognitive judgements of task similarity and difficulty influence performance, if there is an optimal task dissimilarity for optimal learning and whether people know their own desirable level of difficulty when motor learning during a test case scenario. I do this by asking participants to judge the difficulty in different motor sequences that would be analogous to playing a short melody on a piano. I examine if the participants' internal estimates and metacognitive judgments can predict their performance. I found participants are unable to reliably identify similarities between motor sequences and therefore cannot gauge task difficulty from their similarity scores. Instead, participants can reliably gauge task difficulty using execution time. These findings support previous findings from Wilson and Colleagues (2018) and Bjork & Bjork (2020) that there is a desirable level of difficulty, where there is a harmony between difficulty rating and task duration.