This review of human motor skills is historical and critical, and starts about 100 years ago. Three historical periods are identified. The main topics are knowledge of results, distribution of practice, transfer of training, retention, and individual differences in motor learning. Basic research is emphasized, but applied research is included also. The article concludes with projections for the future that are based on past research and the present research climate. Why review nearly a century of research on motor skills? A good experiment can result from bouncing off the last one or a small subset of experiments in the literature, so why bother with the panorama? Any good scientific question always seems to have a long story. Perceptive investigators see the key variables and issues of a scientific topic early, and the generations that follow persist in efforts to understand those variables and issues. The first answer to my question, then, is that a sense of history helps an investigator lock onto important themes. Experiments enriched by history could contribute to the science rather than only brightening an inconsequential corner. Second, a sense of history tends to shunt an investigator away from the fads and fashions of his or her field. Fads and fashions are those inconsequential corners that are temporarily magnified out of proportion and that draw the energy of investigators who either have not seen the worth of persisting themes or who allow themselves to be turned from them. Third, the canons of scholarship are based on history because they require that (a) the origins of ideas be known so that one's own ideas are in perspective and, (b) earlier experiments be known so that the knowledge increment in one's own empirical findings is clear. My aim is to organize variables and issues for learning, retention, and transfer that have regularly attracted investigators of human motor skills, and to discuss the experiments that have been done to understand them. The last historical review of human motor skills was by Irion (1966). My review differs from Irion's in that I cover more material, have a different perspective, and update developments in the field. This article begins with a definition of the domain, and then divides the historical coverage into three historical periods: the Early Period, 1880-1940; the Middle Period, 19401970; and the Present Period, 1970 to the present. The periods are delineated by surges in research activity, although I cannot always be strict about the dividing line. The surge associated

https://psycnet.apa.org/journals/bul/101/1/41.pdf

Historical review and appraisal of research on the learning, retention, and transfer of human motor skills.

INTRODUCTION ......... .... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. ... . . . . .... 2 1 3 A GENERAL LAW O F MOTOR LEARNING. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 1 5 Motor Learning a s a Power Law..... .... ... . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . ....... 2 1 6 The Power Law-A Special Case of Motor Learning? ...... . . .. .. 217 WHAT IS LEARNED WITH PRACTICE . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 1 9 One-To-One Recall-Recognition Processes ... 2 1 9 Schema Representation o f Action 221 Problems with Prescriptive Accounts of Motor Learning .. . . . 223 Motor Skill Acquisition as a Search Strategy 224 INFORMATION AND MOTOR SKILL ACQUISITION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 225 Information as a Prescription 226 Information as Feedback.. .. .. . ...... . .. . ....... . . ... . . .... .. . . . .... ....... 227 Information to Channel the Search ... ... 231 CONCLUDING REMARKS .. . .. .. ...... 233

Motor Skill Acquisition

This investigation was designed to describe the development of lip and jaw coordination during speech and to evaluate the potential influence of speech motor development on phonologic development. Productions of syllables containing bilabial consonants were observed from speakers in four age groups (i.e., 1-year-olds, 2-year-olds, 6-year-olds, and young adults). A video-based movement tracking system was used to transduce movement of the upper lip, lower lip, and jaw. The coordinative organization of these articulatory gestures was shown to change dramatically during the first several years of life and to continue to undergo refinement past age 6. The present results are consistent with three primary phases in the development of lip and jaw coordination for speech: integration, differentiation, and refinement. Each of these developmental processes entails the existence of distinct coordinative constraints on early articulatory movement. It is suggested that these constraints will have predictable consequences for the sequence of phonologic development.

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The physiologic development of speech motor control: Lip and jaw coordination

Although the study of feedback about goal achievement (knowledge of results, KR) has been important for the development principles of augmented information feedback in simple skills, there is reason to question the generalizability of these findings to many common learning situations. A more appropriate type of information for skill learning appears to be augmented kinematic (or kinetic) feedback regarding the movement pattern. The experiments presented here extend recent findings about KR to a paradigm involving kinematic feedback. In Experiment 1, we examined how several kinds of temporal and spatial kinematic information supplement KR in learning. Spatial kinematic variables were more effective than temporal variables, as indicated by performance in a retention test without kinematic feedback. In Experiment 2, we manipulated the schedule of augmented kinematic feedback in a method that paralleled previous KR work. We contrasted averaged schedules of augmented feedback, in which information was given either after every trial or as averaged information after every set of five trials. On retention tests without kinematic feedback given 1 day and 1 week after acquisition, averaged schedules led to enhanced performance over an every-trial format. Together, these results begin to define the variables important in kinematic feedback, and suggest that this feedback may influence learning in ways parallel to KR.

Augmented Kinematic Feedback for Motor Learning.

Knowledge of results (KR)-information feed- back about goal achievement-has been one of the most exten- sively examined variables in motor learning. In most natural movement learning situations, however, instructors more com- monly provide augmented information regarding various kine- matic or kinetic aspects of the movement pattern itself (sometimes termed knowledge of performance, KP). But despite the inherent interest in kinematic feedback, several factors reviewed here have operated to inhibit its study, the most important of which has been the lack of a suitable laboratory task and paradigm. The limita- tions of earlier paradigms have concerned (a) the use of overly simple motor behaviors, probably to minimize the problems in kinematic measurement, (b) the tendency for the environmental goal of the task to be isomorphic with the kinematic pattern, and (c) the failure to use transfer or retention tests as measures of learning effects of the feedback manipulations. In this article, we describe our efforts to create a new paradigm for kinematic feed- back, the rationale for its development, and the details of its op- eration. Finally, we provide evidence that the task and paradigm are sensitive to manipulations of kinematic feedback, providing some assurance that the paradigm can potentially answer future research questions about the role of kinematic feedback for learning. n this article, we present a new research task and para- I digm-developed over the past several years at our labo- ratory at UCLA-that seems suitable for the laboratory study of feedback of the type usually provided by instruc- tors, coaches, therapists, and teachers in real-world move- ment learning settings. Despite a strong, decades-long in- terest in such issues for both practical and theoretical reasons, we argue that the understanding of such feedback processes for learning is underdeveloped, at least in part because a suitable paradigm for its study has not been avail- able. In the sections that follow, we describe several factors that have inhibited the development of such a paradigm in the past, we discuss the important requirements that led to our new pmdigm, and we describe effectiveness of the par- adigm for feedback research.

W.A. Sparrow

Papers

Kinematic information feedback for learning a rapid arm movement