Too Much Guidance? A Brief Review of How Cognitive Support Affects Learning Motor Skills and Implications for VR/XR Technologies

Extended Reality (XR) is a powerful tool to create new and engaging learning environments. As the technology matures, it opens possibilities for professional training programs where information can be situated in the environment, giving detailed guidance to the user. While this detailed guidance has the potential to help users quickly complete complex tasks, recent research from cognitive psychology indicates that active memory retrieval, often referred to as the testing effect, plays a key role in learning. Specifically, increased support during learning is associated with reduced memory retrieval, with negative effects on long-term retention. While these findings are robust for tasks such as word-pair and image learning, less is known about the impact of the testing effect on motor-skill learning of the type often exercised in XR. In this paper, we present the results of a literature review looking at the state of research on the testing effect related to motor-skill learning and retention. While few articles present findings on the testing effect in motor learning, existing results indicate that the impact of the testing effect on motor learning is similar to non-motor learning; however, more research is necessary in order to draw any strong conclusions.