Procedural skills and neurobehavioral freedom

INTRODUCTION Procedural learning (PL) is a part of implicit memory (Shiffrin and Schneider, 1977) and is based on brain subsystems of associative cortex and its connections with basal ganglia and cerebellum (Squire, 1992). PL gives the human individual a gain in freedom: automatic healthy cognitive and motor skills help to save an important amount of conscious work in daily routines and in effortful cognitive and/or motor action (Treisman and Gelade, 1980; Kahneman et al., 1983). In this way, attention can be focused on quick understanding, central coherence awareness, problem-solving processes and social accuracy. Human procedural skills and executively-controlled aspects of action intersect and cooperate with each other (Leisman et al., 2014). Useful procedural automatisms are basically acquired during childhood and youth, but also over the whole course of life, by means of incidental experience and by formal education. PL enhances the natural potentialities (i.e., predispositions) of the agent for a suitable unfolding of his or her operations. From this point of view, acquired automatisms could be included among operational habits in the interface between perceptual-motor and cognitive-volitional human activities.