Practice Conditions in Motor Skill Acquisition

2017

Ecological dynamics proposes that athletes and sports teams can be conceptualised as complex adaptive systems. What does this imply for practice designs developing skill, expertise and talent in athletes? Key insights provided by theoreticians like Nikolai Bernstein (1967) and James J. Gibson (1979) imply that skill, expertise and talent in sport results in coordination of actions with events, objects, structures and other performers in dynamic performance environments. Enhanced organisation of system components in athletes and sports team is predicated on a tight coupling between perception and action systems so that goal-directed behaviour is fine-tuned and information-based during performance and practice.

Perceptual and Motor Skills, 1998

This investigation examined the e&ct of manipulating different quantities of variable practice in the acquisition phase on the retention and transfer performance of a dart throw. Participants in the Specific condition practiced a total of 75 acquisition trials from a distance of 2.39 m. Participants in the Specific+Variable condition pracuced a total of 75 acquisition trials with 25 trials from distances of 1.47 m, 2.39 rn, and 3.30 m. Participants in the Specific+Varplus condition practiced a total of 75 acquisition trials with 15 trials from distances of 1.47 m, 1.93 m, 2.39 m, 2.84 m, and 3.30 rn. Results of the one-way analysis of variance on the 24-hr. retention test from 2.39 m yielded no significant differences among practice conditions for mean radial error. A one-way analysis of variance on the 24-hr. transfer test from 3.76 m indicated that the SpecificcVariable and Specfic+Varplus conditions performed with significantly s m d e r mean radial error than the Specific condition. The results are discussed in regard to recent research and applicability to instructional settings.

2010

Professional athletes involved in sports that require the execution of fine motor skills must practice for a considerable length of time before competing in an event. Why is such practice necessary? Is it merely to warm-up the muscles, tendons, and ligaments, or does the athlete's sensorimotor network need to be constantly recalibrated? In this article, the authors present a point of view in which the human sensorimotor system is characterized by: (a) a high noise level and (b) a high learning rate at the synaptic level (which, because of the noise, does not equate to a high learning rate at the behavioral level). They argue that many heuristics of human skill learning, including the need for a prolonged period of warm-up in experts, follow from these assumptions.

Human Movement Science, 1987

Baltic Journal of Sport and Health Sciences, 2018

Research background and hypothesis. For both the athlete and the coach, the purpose and goal of training is the same: to enhance performance. Research aim. This study investigated the effect of differential learning on basketball free throw and volleyball strike. Research methods. In the basketball experiment, in pre-, post- and retention test design, the free throw performance was measured (number of successful shots). Aiming to investigate transfer performance, jump shots were tested. In the volleyball experiment, movement variability during the strike was further increased by the application of an elastic constraint. The second intervention and quasi-control group trained under constant practice conditions. Ball velocity and accuracy were analysed with a constant and a variable test.Research results. No signifi cant differences were observed for either the free throw (p > 0.05) or the transfer performance (p > 0.05). However, a positive trend for the variable group was obser...

A longstanding research question in the sport psychology literature has been whether a given amount of mental practice prior to performing a motor skill will enhance one's subsequent performance. The research literature, however, has not provided any clear-cut answers to this question and this has prompted the present, more comprehensive review of existing research using the meta-analytic strategy proposed by . From the 60 studies yielding 146 effect sizes the overall average effect size was .48, which suggests, as did Richardson (1967a), that mentally practicing a motor skill influences performance somewhat better than no practice at all. Effect sizes were also compared on a number of variables thought to moderate the effects of mental practice. Results from these comparisons indicated that studies employing cognitive tasks had larger average effect sizes than motor or strength tasks and that published studies had larger average effect sizes than unpublished studies. These findings are discussed in relation to several existing explanations for mental practice and four theoretical propositions are advanced.

Psychological Research, 2012

We investigated the practice-effects on motor skill transfer and the associated representational memory changes that occur during the within-practice and betweenpractice phases. In two experiments, participants produced extension-flexion movements with their dominant right arm for a limited or prolonged practice session arranged in either a single-or multi-session format. We tested the ability of participants to transfer the original pattern (extrinsic transformation) or the mirrored one (intrinsic transformation) to the non-dominant left arm, 10 min and 24 h after the practice sessions. Results showed that practice induces rapid motor skill improvements that are nontransferable irrespective of the amount of acquisition trials. Furthermore, the extrinsic component of the skill develops early and remains the dominant coding system during practice. Conversely, we found distinct between-practice memory changes: a limited practice induces an off-line development of the extrinsic component, whereas a prolonged practice session subserves the off-line development of the intrinsic component (Experiment 2). We provided further evidence that the long-term representation of the motor skill also depends on the nature of the practice session itself: the parsing of practice into multiple sessions narrows the effector-transfer capacities in comparison to a single session (Experiment 1). These findings yield theoretical and practical implications that are discussed in the context of recent motor skill learning models.

Motriz: Revista de Educação Física, 2017

There is a considerable interest in the effects of practice schedules in the learning of a motor skill. Practice schedules have been the most investigated subject in the area of Motor Learning in the last decades 1. Initially, investigations were carried out manipulating variable practice 2 , under the perspective of the contextual interference effect (CIE), which is defined as the degree of interference created by the practice of two or more skills within the same session 2,3. Variable practice can be organized in a blocked (AAABBBCCC), serial (ABCABCABC) and random fashion (ACBABCBAC), the assumption being that high interference (i.e., serial and random practice) is better than low interference (i.e., blocked practice) 4,5. At that time, studies addressed neither what is manipulated nor what is learned during practice. This question came to light when Magill and Hall 3 proposed that the CIE would occur when practice varied generalized motors programs (GMPs), but not when the parameters were varied. Sekiya and Magill 6 ; Sekiya, Magill and Anderson 7 ; Sekiya, Magill, Sidaway and Anderson 8 showed that in both cases, variable practice improves learning parameters 6,7,8. Since variable practice improves learning parameters, the idea that followed was that constant practice could improve the learning of the GMPs. According to Lai and Shea 9 ; Lai, Shea, Wulf and Wright 10 ; Shea, Lai, Wright, Immink and Black 11 , constant practice leads to GMP learning because the trial-to-trial response stability from constant practice improves the formation of the GMP. On the other hand, the trial-to-trial response instability resultant from variable practice favors the identification of differences on variations of the skill 6,8,10 , improving learning parameters. The instability created by variations of practice tends to provide more possibilities of the response variations, which throughout practice would improve the capacity of differentiation among them. These results suggest that combining constant and variable practice might favor the learning of both GMP and parameters, respectively 10. Other studies 11,12,13 showed that, besides constant practice, blocked practice would also improve the GMP learning, assuming that there was repetition of the task during blocked practice. A stable environment would also lead to GMP learning. Moreover, the interference caused by variation between blocks might also improve parameters learning. So, this practice schedule might lead to learning either GMP or parameters. Consequently, some studies have combined the constant practice in the first half of the session followed by variable practice in the same session of practice, which has led to GMP and parameters learning 10,14. More specifically, Lage, Alves, Oliveira, Palhares, Ugrinowitsch and Benda 14 found that blocked practice in the second half of practice improved the parameters of the skill, probably due to the movement structure (i.e., GMP) learned on the first part of acquisition phase. These studies have manipulated the total time (i.e., parameters), which favored the GMP learning and the differentiation between the variations of the task. Nevertheless, it is necessary to manipulate the relative time (i.e., GMP) in the variable practice to observe the effects over the GMP learned during the constant practice. Furthermore, the purpose of this study was to investigate the combination of constant-blocked practices with variations of GMP and parameters, to illustrate their effects on GMP and parameters learning. It was expected that after learning the GMP with constant practice, the variation of parameters in the second half of the session would be more beneficial to GMP learning than variation of programs.

Perceptual and Motor Skills, 2020

Studies of the benefits of a distributed practice schedule on motor skill acquisition have typically found that distribution of practice results in better learning. However, less research has focused on how the benefits of distributed practice are impacted by timing during acquisition. To examine how timing of skill acquisition interacts with distribution of practice we had two groups of participants complete either an extensive massed or distributed training schedule to learn a speed stacking sequence across ten sessions. For participants in both groups, we provided observational learning to facilitate skill acquisition. Analysis of speed stacking time on a retention test revealed an overall benefit for the distributed relative to the massed practice group. Interestingly, our analysis of the benefits of distributed practice during training only showed performance benefits in the early session (session one) and later sessions (sessions eight, nine, and ten) of skill acquisition but ...