muscle: a standalone construct

The procedural motor skill retained through practice, so that a well-rehearsed movement can be produced quickly and with little conscious attention: despite the everyday name, this memory is held in the nervous system, in motor cortex and cerebellum, and not in the muscle tissue itself. Shadmehr and Holcomb's 1997 Neural correlates of motor memory consolidation showed that a newly learned movement is consolidated over several hours into a stable representation, shifting the brain regions that support it. The referent is a learned control policy stored in neurons, and the word muscle here is a misnomer, because nothing about the skill lives in the contractile tissue.[1]

Unit

A consolidated motor skill, by movement accuracy and speed after practice

Recovery means

Not applicable; once consolidated the skill can be retrieved on demand, and it fades only slowly without use

Measured by

Assessed by retention and transfer tests, by error and reaction time on a trained task, and by neuroimaging of the motor networks