Yeah - maybe, but Pavlov wasn’t just about dogs salivating - he also did work on conditioned blink response and other stuff, which is more similar to brain/body reflexes. I think it’s been unpacked and extended to a whole load of different-but-related phenomena since Pavlov’s day.
"Procedural memory is a type of implicit memory (unconscious memory) and long-term memory which aids the performance of particular types of tasks without conscious awareness of these previous experiences.
Procedural memory guides the processes we perform and most frequently resides below the level of conscious awareness. When needed, procedural memories are automatically retrieved and utilized for the execution of the integrated procedures involved in both cognitive and motor skills, from tying shoes to flying an airplane and from drawing to reading. Procedural memories are accessed and used without the need for conscious control or attention."
monkey do, monkey do
Yeah, it’s not really muscle memory, but reinforced learning is going to help. There are a lot of things to pay attention to in poker. Betting, behavior, everyone’s cards, probability calculations. The more you play it, the more you can run some of those tasks in the background.
My experience playing other games competitively is that you start to develop gut-feeling or intuitive responses that you can rely on to be correct the vast majority of the time, even though a full explanation of why a play or a bet is the correct one might take longer to think out thoroughly.
What if it’s a single experience that has a long-term effect? Around 40 years ago I had spent the winter’s day in the forest cutting firewood. I came inside and had taken off my boots and went to grab a beer out of the cellar refrigerator while in my damp socks and standing on a damp cellar floor. There was a short somewhere in the refrigerator and during the defrost cycle the door handle was energized.
I latched on and couldn’t let go. The only way I got loose was by backing up far enough to tip the thing over on its front which pulled the plug out. To this day if I’m standing on a conductive surface I have to make a special effort to grab a metal handle without brushing it with the back of my knuckles. Even a doorknob with no chance of holding any kind of electrical potential other than a static charge gets the back of the knuckles touch, just to be sure. It makes me uncomfortable to grasp it without the test.
I had one bad experience 40 years ago, and tens of thousands of normal ones since, but the rule set up by one bad experience controls my behavior.
Sounds like a textbook case of PTSD - which, in turn, now that we’re discussing it, sounds like a special case of classical conditioning.
Having once jumped atop a hot stove, a cat will never jump upon a hot stove again… but it doesn’t jump upon any cold ones either.