Motor program

A motor program is an abstract representation of movement that centrally organizes and controls the many degrees of freedom involved in performing an action.^p. 182 Signals transmitted through efferent and afferent pathways allow the central nervous system to anticipate, plan or guide movement. Evidence for the concept of motor programs include the following:^p. 182

This is not meant to underestimate the importance of feedback information, merely that another level of control beyond feedback is used:

The response-chaining, or reflex-chaining hypothesis, proposed by William James (1890), was one of the earliest descriptions of movement control. This open-loop hypothesis postulated that movements required attention only for initiation of the first action.^p. 165 As such, each subsequent movement was thought to be automatically triggered by response-produced afferent information from the muscles. Although feedback is involved in this process, ongoing movements cannot be modified if there are unexpected changes in the environment; feedback is not compared to some internally generated reference value for error checking. However, research involving deafferented animals and humans suggests feedback is not necessary for movement, thus the response-chaining hypothesis provides an incomplete account of movement control.

In contrast to the open-loop response-chaining hypothesis, Adams' closed-loop theory suggested that processing of afferent information was central in human motor control. Adams’ closed-loop theory is based on basic motor learning research that focused on slow, graded, linear positioning tasks, which involved error detection and correction to meet goal demands. To learn a movement, a “motor program” consisting of two states of memory (i.e. memory trace and perceptual trace), is required. The memory trace (equivalent to recall memory in verbal learning) initiates the motor movement, chooses its initial direction and determines the earliest portions of the movement. Strengthening of the memory trace results from practice and feedback about movement outcome (see motor learning). In addition, the perceptual trace (similar to recognition memory in verbal tasks) is involved in guidance of the limb to the correct position along a trajectory. This is accomplished by comparing incoming feedback to the perceptual trace, which is formed from the sensory consequences of the limb being at the correct/incorrect endpoint in past experience. In the event of an error, the limb is adjusted until the movement is appropriate to the goal of the action. Importantly, the more accurate the movement, the more useful the perceptual trace that is collected and retained.

...
Wikipedia