You have probably heard it said many times that practice makes perfect. But while this sounds very encouraging to someone learning a new skill, it is not entirely true. Sure, practicing a skill will lead to improvement…but perfection? Nope. At some point, we all hit a wall that no amount of practice can overcome. Studies show that once a high level of skill mastery has already been attained, simply increasing the volume of training that one does is a very poor way to break through plateaus.
This raises questions about the limits of deliberate practice for those who encounter a “ceiling effect,” where additional practice yields little improvement. To overcome these limits, innovative training methods are needed that do not solely rely on the quantity of training. Recent studies suggest that specialized sensorimotor training, such as passive motion exercises, may enhance motor skills. But much of this research has focused on simple tasks that give us little information about breaking through plateaus in learning real-world skills.
The robot moves fingers in ways that the musician is unaccustomed to (📷: Shinichi Furuya)
When it comes to complex motor skills, like those required in piano playing, the lack of prior physical experience with advanced movements makes it challenging to refine skills further due to difficulty in simulating or imagining ideal motions. If researchers at the NeuroPiano Institute are right, passive training methods, which provide sensory input through technologies like robotic exoskeletons, may address this challenge by introducing unexperienced movement patterns to improve precision and coordination.
To test this hypothesis, the researchers designed a study using an exoskeleton hand robot capable of independently moving each finger in various patterns. They tested whether exposing expert pianists to passive finger movements could enhance their already overtrained skills. Thirty pianists participated in home-based pretraining and laboratory-based passive training sessions. Participants were divided into two groups: one exposed to complex finger movement patterns and the other to simpler patterns. Results showed that only the group trained with complex movement patterns improved their piano performance, demonstrating faster and more accurate finger movements. These gains persisted even after the intervention, indicating that passive training could overcome the plateau effect seen with conventional practice.
Further analysis of the results revealed that the improvement in motor skills was linked to changes in muscle coordination and timing precision, particularly in movements involving specific finger combinations. However, the training did not enhance general sensorimotor functions or anatomical features unrelated to piano playing, suggesting that the benefits were specific to the trained motor skill.
It seems somewhat counterintuitive that using a robot to move your body for you would help you learn a skill better than practicing on your own, but the results speak for themselves. Perhaps these insights will help musicians, athletes, and other highly-skilled individuals to overcome the limits of their expertise and help us to better understand the neuroplasticity of the sensorimotor system.
