The Power of Two or More – Skill acquisition beyond individual learning

Abstract

Background: Motor skill acquisition is typically approached as an individual process, even though many rarely train, practice, or perform in isolation. In real-world sport environments, learning is embedded in social interactions, shared goals, and collective movement.

View of the past: Historically, skill learning in humans has taken place within communal and cooperative settings—from dance and martial arts to tool use and ritual. While social learning theories have been widely applied in education and psychology, their application to sport skill acquisition has remained limited, with research favouring controlled, individual-based interventions.

Current state: With technological advances, research has started to describe the dynamics of real-time coordination and collective behaviour in groups and teams. However, few studies have examined how these dynamics emerge throughout the learning process, or how traditional skill acquisition principles translate to group contexts in influence learning.

Future perspective: Advancing understanding of group-based skill acquisition requires a shift toward studying learning as a distributed, adaptive process shaped by social interaction. Integrating longitudinal study designs, group-level analysis, and advanced tracking technologies we can begin to understand not just how athletes move together, but how they learn together.