Chapter 1 Introduction to Motor Learning and Performance

1. Chapter 1 Introduction to Motor Learning and Performance C H A P T E R 1 Introduction to Motor Learning and Performance

2. Objectives This chapter will help you to understand the following • The scientific method in skills research • Taxonomies for classifying skills • Common variables used to measure motor performance • The rationale for developing a conceptual model for motor performance

3. Theory Testing • A theory is a human-made structure whose purpose is to explain how various phenomena occur. • From theories, hypotheses can be formed and then tested in the laboratory. • A theory cannot survive if something predicted from it turns out not to be the case.

4. History of Motor Learning and Performance Research Before 1940s • Investigations of relatively complex, high-level skills (e.g., telegraphy and typing) • Studies by biologists and physiologists concerning the fundamental mechanisms of muscle and muscle-force production • Studies by biologists and physiologists concerning the study of nerves and the nervous system (continued)

5. History of Motor Learning and Performance Research (continued) Dr. Franklin Henry • Experimental psychologist who worked in the physical education department at the University of California at Berkeley • Studied gross motor skills often involving the whole body, a new tradition of laboratory experimentation • Father of motor behavior research

6. What Is a Skill? Skills involve achieving some well-defined environmental goal in these ways: • Maximizing the certainty of goal achievement • Minimizing the physical and mental energy costs of performance • Minimizing the time used (continued)

7. What Is a Skill? (continued) Three elements are critical to almost any skill: 1. Perceiving the relevant environmental features 2. Deciding what to do and where and when to do it to achieve the goal 3. Producing organized muscular activity to generate movements that achieve the goal

8. Open and Closed Skills For open skills, the environment is variable and unpredictable during the action (e.g., team sports) For closed skills, the environment is stable and predictable (e.g., drilling a hole in a block of wood)

9. Table 1.1

10. Discrete Skills Discrete skills usually have an easily defined beginning and end, often with a very brief duration of movement (e.g., throwing a ball, firing a rifle, or turning on a light switch)

11. Serial Skills A serial skill is a group of discrete skills strung together to make up a new, more complicated skilled action (e.g., shifting gears in a car). The word serial implies that the order of the elements is usually critical for successful performance.

12. Continuous Skills • Continuous skills have arbitrary beginning and end points, the behavior flowing for minutes or hours (e.g., swimming and knitting).

13. Table 1.2

14. Error Scores in Discrete Tasks • Computing an error score for a given subject who was attempting a series of trials on a test requiring accuracy (e.g., the subject threw 5 darts) • Various ways to compute an error score

15. Constant Error (CE) • Average all the scores for each subject • Interpreted as an overall tendency to underthrow or overthrow the target

16. Absolute Error (AE) • Consider the absolute value (e.g., with the sign ignored or removed) of the error on each trial, and take the average of those error scores for the various trials • Interpreted as one person or group being more off target than another

17. Variable Error • A measure of the subject’s inconsistency • Computed by squaring the difference between each trial’s error score and the subject’s CE • Sum those over all of the trials, and divide by the number of trials • Compute the square root of this value

18. Formulas for Error Measures • CE = [(∑ Xi − T) / N] • AE = [(∑ |Xi − T|) / N] • VE = √ [(∑ Xi − CE) 2 / N] • where ∑ = the sum of, i = trial number, Xi = score for the ith trial, T = the target distance, N = the number of trials, |= absolute value of and √ = the square root

19. Error Scores in Continuous Tasks • Continuous tasks, like tracking, are capable of producing many error scores on a single trial. • RMSE represents two types of behaviors: the subject’s bias tendency as well as inconsistency in the tracking behavior.

20. Calculating RMSE • Compute the distance of the subject’s tracking response from target line at every set distance point along the track or at a constant interval of time along the track. • The root mean square error score is computed by calculating the squared deviations for each measured position along the track, then taking the square root of the sum of those scores.

21. Conceptual Model of Motor Performance and Learning • An overall viewpoint • An information flow model, which considers how information of various kinds is used in producing and learning skilled action • Built on throughout the textbook