Effective motor performance is important for surviving and thriving, and skilled movement is
critical in many activities. Much theorizing over the past few decades has focused on how …

Highlights•Expectations for positive experience/outcomes benefit motor performance and
learning.•Conditions that support performer autonomy benefit motor performance and …

In the OPTIMAL theory of motor learning [Wulf, G., & Lewthwaite, R.(2016). Optimizing
performance through intrinsic motivation and attention for learning: The OPTIMAL theory of …

In the OPTIMAL theory of motor learning (Wulf & Lewthwaite, 2016), three factors are
postulated to facilitate motor performance and learning: Enhanced expectancies (EE) for …

Skilled movement entails learned motor patterns that are produced with a high degree of
accuracy, consistency, and efficiency. The classic definition of skill by Guthrie (1952) …

Despite increasing interest in the role of reward in motor learning, the underlying
mechanisms remain ill defined. In particular, the contribution of explicit processes to reward …

Without doubt, motor behavior is subject to a variety of social-cognitive-affective influences
(Lewthwaite & Wulf, 2010a). For instance, the instructions or feedback given to learners not …

We examined whether the combination of two factors that have consistently been found to
enhance motor learning–an external focus (EF) of attention and autonomy support (AS) …

Highlights•Reward and punishment have dissociable effects on motor skill learning.•Motor
skill learning involves action selection and action execution.•Other disciplines reveal …

A key postulate of traditional theories of motor skill-learning (eg, Fitts and Posner, 1967;
Shiffrin and Schneider, 1977) is that expert performance is largely automatic in nature and …