This lecture is going to have a lot of information in it. better with it if you have already read So hang with me. You will probably do chapter one and then also pages 202 203 from your textbook. If you haven't, that's okay, but just understand there's a lot of information that's going to be coming at you. So, one of the main things you need to understand first is what is motor learning. Well, if we start with an answer to the question - what is learning. Learning is a change in behavior through experience. You can also expand on that and say it's a relatively permanent change in behavior based on practice or experience, not just maturation. So when you add the word motor to that and define motor learning, you're talking about changes in internal processes that determine a person's capability for producing a motor task. In other words, we make inferences about someone's level of motor learning by watching their performance. It's not just that their muscles got stronger. It's that they actually learned something. It's a change in an internal process, in the brain, that determines a person's capability for producing a motor task. It's a relatively permanent change. Motor performance is what you can actually observe. So you don't actually observe someone's motor learning, you make inferences about their motor learning by watching them. So motor performance is the observable attempt of a person to produce a voluntary action. Another related term is motor development. Motor development is the study of movement behavior and the associated biological change in human movement across the lifespan. All of these terms and motor control fall within the broad field of motor behavior. A motor skill is a skill for which the primary determinant of success is the quality of the movement that the performer produces. We make a lot of movements, some of which we would not really categorize as motor skills. So for example, if you're playing chess, yes you do have to pick up the chess piece and move it across, you know, to another square on the chess board. That in itself is a motor skill, but the primary concern of chess is cognitive which we're going to talk about that in a minute. How to categorize tasks by whether they're more motor or more cognitive. Another way to categorize motor skills is by the way the task is organized, so discrete tasks have a definite beginning and end. And they are typically relatively brief so for example serving a volleyball is a discrete skill. It has a sequence which goes in order, the different parts of the serving, and it has a definite beginning and end. A serial skill is several discrete skills put together in a specific order or a sequence, and a good example of that would be like a tumbling pass in gymnastics. It might start with a brief run, then a leap, a round off, then back handspring, then a double tuck back, and a landing. All of that put together is several discreet skills put together and in a specific order making it a serial skill. And then a continuous skill is a skill that has no definite beginning or end. For example riding a bicycle has no definite beginning and end. It's just up to the person riding the bike when they want to stop, or running or walking has no definite beginning and definite end. Another way to categorize skills are by the type of elements. We have motor elements. A motor skill is a skill for which the primary determinant success is the quality of the movement of the performer produces. That's the same definition of motor skill that I gave you a minute ago. I'm going to go a cognitive skill is a skill for which the primary determinant of success is the quality of the performers decisions regarding what to do. So the question is if it's a motor skill, it's more motor control and the quality of the movement, f it's a more cognitive skill, the success has more to do with decision-making than it does with the actual quality of the movement. So again, an example would be a cartwheel is definitely a motor skill where playing poker is more of a cognitive skill. Yes you have to move the cards but for that matter you could tell someone what card to play for you, if you didn't have the use of your hands. Another way to categorize skills is by the environmental predictability if we categorize a skill as an open skill done in open environment. That means it's performed in an unpredictable environment or while you're in motion. It requires the performers to adapt to movements in response to dynamic properties of the environment. If you are playing football and your position is a safety, you have a constant moving target. The environment is open; it's changing from moment to moment, where a closed skill is something like bowling it's consistent every time. The skill is performed in an environment that is predictable or stationary and that allows performers to plan their movements in advance. So when it comes to planning your movements it makes a big difference whether the skill is open or closed or whether it's done in an open environment or a closed environment. When we look at someone and we make a judgement about their performance and then therefore we make an inference about their motor learning. We are talking about their performance proficiency. Three ways we can categorize or characterize skill performance were identified by Guthrie in 1952. One is the certainty of goal achievement. If the person is the probability is high, that they're going to achieve the goal for example, are they going to throw the ball within the strike zone .They have high certainty of goal achievement. Another way to look at the characteristics of skilled performance is minimum energy expenditure. If one person can do something very efficiently they have higher skill than someone who takes a lot of energy to do the same thing because they're doing it in an inefficient way. And then thirdly some skills are performed best or an indicator that they're being performed at a high level of skill is that they take a minimum movement time. You're able to do something relatively quickly. Think of a child learning to zip a zipper for example. Someone who is just learning to do a zipper or tie their shoelaces, it may take them a long time to do it. So, the movement time is long whereas for you it's short. It may take them a lot of energy to figure out how to zip that zipper. They're grabbing on; they're jerking, you know, the zipper trying to move it up and down instead of doing it in a smooth motion so their energy expenditure is greater. And then they may not even be able to get it done. They're not sure or the probability of success isn't really there yet. So, these are three characteristics of skilled performance as opposed to unskilled performance. We've already talked a little bit about the differences between motor performance and motor learning, but to point it out here is it's very important because this is kind of a basis for the classes understanding this. Motor learning is inferred by watching someone perform, okay so you watch someone perform, and you then who make an inference about what amount of learning has gone on. If you look on page 13 in table 1.5, you'll see that as people move through different stages of learning, the performance characteristics change. So, if you see someone who's just learning to drive a car, versus someone who's been driving a car for, you know, 15 years, the performance is going to look different and you're going to see how it looks different. Motor performance can be influenced by temporary factors like fatigue or motivation, physical conditioning, and that can distort your learning inferences. So if you just observe someone for a minute or for one trial, one instance, one attempt, and they miss the shots, to say well they're horrible, you know, basketball player. They don't know how to shoot a ball at all. Might be totally wrong. Maybe they were distracted. They're tired. They were motivated, maybe they just made nine shots in a row and they missed one and, the one they missed was the only one you saw. So the last point here is that learning inferences are more accurate when they're based on performance observations demonstrating a relatively stable characteristics. So when you're observing someone to really make up an accurate inference about what they've learned, you need to see them do a skill more than once and watch for stability in their ability to do so. Paul Fitz identify three stages that learners go through as they're learning a motor skill. And as we talked about this you'll be able to think of a lot of examples of people going through these stages as they learn a motor skill. Anything from, you know, dribbling a basketball to juggling, to driving a car, to, you know, working a remote control on a television, playing a video game. The first stage he identified is called the cognitive phase or the cognitive stage. The learner is new to the task and the learner is trying to understand what it is they're supposed to do. So a lot of times what's happening is the person is actually talking themselves through the steps of the task. Whether it's driving a car, they may be literally talking to themselves either out loud or in their head saying something like okay press the brake okay now shift the gear put your right hand turn signal on or if they're doing something like a cartwheel they may be repeating what their coach said or their teacher said like hand hand foot foot or toes just to get the very basics of the skill if you're teaching somebody to water-ski and you're in the boat you're telling them what to do you're probably saying something like you know toes up skis out feet together knees bent something like that and they're kind of saying the same thing so at this point the skill does not look very good. It's not consistent. They may not even be getting it yet, but they are talking themselves through. It's very cognitvite and very verbal. The second stage is called the associative stage, and it begins when the learner understands the best way to do the task but really isn't an expert quite yet. So, this person maybe isn't talking themselves through what they have to do but they're identifying their mistakes a little bit more and they're working on how to make it look better how to improve the task performance. So this would be someone who can can drive a car, but it's not really smooth yet. And they really can't focus their attention on a lot of other things at the same time. So they may recognize, oh I took at that corner a little too sharp or ooh I kind of rubbed my tire against the curb. But, they are at least doing the basics of the skill correctly. The autonomous phase you can remember by just calling it the automatic phase. This is where the person doesn't have to devote much attention or much mental energy to performing the skill. In fact the person is able to perform the skill and have a lot of attention left over to pay to other things. So this is someone who's been driving for a long time who is basically an expert driver who can; have a conversation, change the radio station, talk on their phone. Now there is a point at which the person can become overloaded and can make mistakes, but we'll talk about that later when we talk about attention so the three stages again that that fits goes that fits identified are on the next slide. The first is the cognitive task where the primary concerns are to understand the task, understand the criteria, and how to make that first attempt. The second is the associative face where the learner knows the most effective technique but maybe can't do it quite yet. And learners making subtle adjustments to improve his or her performance. And then this third stage is where the movement is autonomous or almost automatic. So the task can be performed with less interference from other activities or distractions. Some other motor learning scientists basically identified these same steps but worded it in a different way. For example, Gentile in 1972 talked about getting the idea of the movement which would be like the cognitive stage and then moving to either fixation, which would be something, a skill that's in a closed environment, where you want to do the same thing every time, or diversification where you can take a skill and adapt it to a variety of situations. Adams identified the verbal motor skill or verbal motor phase and then said it changes into a motor face so at the beginning again you're talking yourself through it and then later when it becomes more automatic as pit as Fitz would say and it he termed it a motor task and then Newell in 85 talked about coordination which is acquiring the pattern and then control which is fine-tuning or adapting the pattern as needed for any given situation so we've talked a lot about the word learning and then also the term motor learning one question that's out there is can we learn without realizing we're learning or what it is that we're learning in other words can we learn implicitly so I think if you think about it the answer that question is obviously yes you learn things whether you are consciously realizing and thinking about hey I'm learning this at this moment but you learn to do certain skills and to become better at them with practice or experience so a lot of times we're learning something and instead of being explicit like a coach showing you how to do something and talking you through it the learning that's going on is more implicit okay I'm going to shift gears here and talk a little bit about your experimental design assignment all the way in section four you're going to need to actually design a motor learning experiment so just to get you thinking about that I want to give you a little heads-up on some of the issues so you can start thinking about what would be a good topic what would be a good well a good topic for something that interests you that is a motor learning experiment so some issues to consider in some terms to go ahead and note when you write a proposal or what becomes a manuscript that would be submitted to a journal which is the final outcome of research you have an introduction or a literature review that includes the work that's been done in the past related to your subject related to your theory and your topic you're also introducing the the broad area and then narrowing it down to focus on specifically what you're going to investigate you're also going to talk about the methods so you have to be very clear if you have participants how many are them where did you recruit them exactly what's going on what are the different manipulations and the design of the experiment if there's an apparatus or a task it has to be really clearly outlined and then what is the procedure what are the steps for the experiment itself you'll also typically talk about data analysis which in here you're not going to have to do any major statistical analysis but it's something - it needs to be addressed especially in a full-blown research article okay so some terms - no reliability basically means repeatability so if you were to take a measurement or conduct a test and then take the same measurement again and you got two completely different answers for example if you measured someone's height and weight and then five minutes later you measure their height and weight again and there was a drastic change then that information is not reliable another term to be aware of is validity validity is measuring what you say you are measuring okay so the data is not valid if I say for example that this is not a motor learning example but if I say I'm testing the endurance of someone's back by having them do push-ups. That's not valid because the muscles used in push-ups are the pectoralis major, the triceps, and the anterior deltoid, not the back muscles, so I'm not measuring what I say I', measuring. And then objectivity is the agreement of examiners. So for example, if you measured someone's ability to shoot free-throws and you had them shoot 100 free-throws and you had two people counting how many they made and one person counted 60 and one person counted 75, you have a major problem with objectivity. Some other considerations when you set up an experiment, you've got to think about the administration of any test, cost, the equipment, what facilities do you have available to you, you know. I don't want you to make up some time this guy experiment where you're going to have NBA players, you know, using force plates and measuring their jumping dynamics or something like that. It's not realistic. You don't have the equipment to do that or the access to the people. The term assessment is a combination of measurement and evaluation, so measurement is simply a collection of information. It could be a test like motor performance, observation of behavior, or questions that you ask. Or, it could be non test that you measure things like height weight or length evaluation is the process of decision-making regarding the value of collected information so if you know that someone made four out of five free throws. All that is is measurement. That would not be that impressive if that was an NBA player. That would be impressive if it was your 80 year old grandma sitting in a wheelchair at the free-throw line. So without knowing more information, you really can't do evaluation. So again evaluation is taking the information that you collected, that you measured, and then combining it with the other information you know to make an overall decision or judgment. Some terms that you're going to see when you read about motor learning experiments in this, in this course in this textbook and some of the papers I'm going to have you read, one is a control group. So if I have some people, I measure how fast they can light a whole book of matches, one match at a time. And I have two groups one I put them through some training boot camp on how to light matches quickly and another group I don't. The group that I don't train that I just pull off the street is the control group because I want someone to whom I can compare the people who went through my match lighting bootcamp. Those are my experimental group of people. Also what you'll see in a lot of motor learning experiments is the use of novel tasks. If we take a, if we want to test some theory using a motor skill, and we use something like you know tossing a ball up with our hand and catching it in our hand over and over. For most people, that's not a novel task. That's something they've done a lot or writing your name or typing. So you'll see a lot of kind of what sound like really weird motor skills or motor tasks that people are being asked to do. The reason that's done is so you can eliminate experience as one of the variables that you can't control. Another issue is that you need to be sure to give consistent instructions. If you're asking people to do the same thing, a lot of times you need to use a script and so that the instructions given are exactly the same to everyone. You also may see what's called a dual task paradigm. That's used a lot of times to investigate attention and our ability to use our attention in different ways. Dual task means that you're having someone do two tasks at the same time. So in other words if I had someone juggling scarves as one task and at the same time I'm having them listen to someone read a book out loud, and every time the person reads a letter that reads a word that starts with the letter S, they have to say s out loud. That's a dual task paradigm, and that allows us to see well if there have enough attention to devote to both tasks and at what point they become overloaded. So that's a dual task paradigm. Retention is referring to did the person learn enough to retain. Were they able to remember what they learned and do it later okay. So it's like testing someone later after a training session or a period of time. And then transfer is I'll be able to take the skill on which they were trained and adapted to a slightly different task okay. If I taught someone how to overhand serve a volleyball, could I then give them I don't know a volleyball that weighs half a pound more because it's not exactly the same thing. Could they transfer, could they adjust the amount of force that is necessary and transfer it to a new skill. Okay, I know this presentation has had a lot of information, but again I hope you've done the reading, and that'll help you do well on the quiz and the assignment and you can always come back and listen to this lecture again if you need to.