Metaphorical instructions may lead to less verbal control of a newly learned movement

What is it about?

Analogy instructions are comparisons of something new (to be learned) with something well-known. When teaching movements, using such instructions may be beneficial to the learner's performance, compared to traditional forms of instruction. We showed that these benefits may be because learners rely less on verbal-analytic processes when they plan their movements.

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Why is it important?

When instructing movements, we often face the difficulty of having to teach a complex movement in as simple a way as possible: if the learner has to process a lot of information, their progress is slow. Understanding how the use of analogy instructions affects information processing in the brain will help in finding and fine-tuning novel forms of instruction that solve this issue. This may lead to improved learning in fields such as sports, rehabilitation, surgery, aviation and many others.