Motor Control, for Instance

One of Gordon Logan's notable contributions was his demonstration that stored instances of previous stimulus–response mappings provide a useful substrate for effective performance. The principle was initially demonstrated in alphabet–arithmetic tasks (Logan, 1988) but later was applied to reading (Logan, 1997), attention and memory (Logan, 2002), and typewriting (Crump et al., 2019). If reliance on stored instances is fundamental, one would expect to see it manifested in even more basic actions such as moving the hand from one place to another or positioning the feet in standing or walking, which are typical topics of investigation in the field of motor control. Here we describe a theory of motor control that relies on the idea that stored instances are indeed the basis for the control of fundamental physical behaviors. The instance-based theory of motor control has been quite successful, which speaks to the perspicacity of Gordon Logan.