I recall our fixed wing brethren have a description for how one shoves the stick, from memory I think they refer to it as flying through either feel or flying through displacement. With all beginners it's displacement then as they build experience they (or most of them at least) learn the feel, and the flying bit becomes second nature.
A rotary wing example of this was when I was learning the hovering autos in the low inertia rotor r22. Instructor chops the throttle and up goes the lever - control displacement pure and simple. I have no recollection of where the cyclic was shoved as I just wanted the skids to land flat. Then I moved to the high inertia rotor B206. Instructor chops throttle and up goes the lever and up went the JetBanger
. But I was onto it quickly and beat my instructor in pushing the collective back down then pulling it back up again in a more sympathetic way relative to our rate of decent. I think my instructor was suitably impressed, I even had the nose yaw pinned on its heading without much thinking about it.
Not a terribly exciting story I know but one that does show the development mode of learning to fly under supervision. Autorotation is a stable mode of flight that one should be able to transition into automatically and easily after a loss of engine power, so that when one looks up and sees that one is about to park the machine in a big dead tree looming up ahead one may have brought themselves that extra few seconds of flying around it. We may learn this maneuver through displacement technique first, but after we get the hang of it and explore the envelope under supervision, we should find that moving into the stable flight mode of autorotation becomes second nature.
Having said all that, I know some fixed wingers, albeit low timers, that never mastered flying by feel and probably never will. Yes they are capable of flying to an acceptable standard, but they tend to work harder at it than most to achieve a rather ordinary outcome.