Lecture 1 - Motor Learning & Performance

Question 1

What is motor learning?

Answer 1

• Relatively permanent gains in motor skill capability associated with practice or experience
• If not permanent then learning has not occurred

Question 2

What is motor development ?

Answer 2

• Continuous, age-related process of change in movement
• Change may be more or less noticeable in age
• Rates of development can change across individuals
• Not all changes in movement are development

Question 3

What is motor control?

Answer 3

• study of the neural, physical, & behavioural aspects of movement

Question 4

What are motor skills?

Answer 4

• The ability to bring about some end result with maximum certainty & minimum outlay of energy, or of time & energy

Question 5

How do motor skills involve achieving a goal?

Answer 5

• Maximizing certainty of goal achievement
• Minimizing the physical and mental energy costs of performance
• Minimizing time used

Question 6

What are the 3 elements critical to any skill?

Answer 6

• Perceiving the relevant environmental features
• Deciding what to do & where & when to do it to achieve the goal
• Producing organized muscular activity to generate movements that achieve the goal

Question 7

What are open skills?

Answer 7

• The environment is variable & unpredictable during the action (i.e., team sports)
• Cannot predict what others will do

Question 8

What are closed skills?

Answer 8

• The environment is stable & predictable (i.e., drilling a hole in a block of wood)

Question 9

What are discrete skills?

Answer 9

• Usually have an easily defined beginning & end, often with a very brief duration of movement (i.e., throwing a ball)

Question 10

What are continuous skills?

Answer 10

• No particular beginning & end points, with the behaviour flowing for minutes or hours (i.e., steering a car, swimming)

Question 11

What are serial skills?

Answer 11

• A group of discrete skills strung together to make up a new, more complicated skilled action
• The order of the elements is usually critical for successful performance
• Series of discrete skills that are chained together to form a routine

Question 12

What is object manipulation & body transport?

Answer 12

• Factors that help precisely define skills:
• Identify whether a performer is manipulating an object during skill performance
  - I.e., hockey players utilizing puck control
• Identify if the body is in motion or stationary during skill performance
  - I.e., dentist standing still, waitress moving around

Question 13

What is Constant Error (CE)?

Answer 13

• Average of all the scores for each subject
• Interpreted as an overall tendency to under throw or overthrow the target

Question 14

What is Absolute Error (AE)?

Answer 14

• Consider the absolute value of the error on each trial & take the average of those error scores
• Interpreted as one person or group being more off target than another

Question 15

What is Root Means Square Error (RMSE)?

Answer 15

• The participants bias tendency as well as inconsistency in the tracking behaviour
• Continuous tasks, like tracking, are capable of producing many error scores on a single trail

Question 16

What is correlation?

Answer 16

• The association strength between scores
• The size (from -1.0 to + 1.0) indicates the strength of a relationship
• Correlations can be positive or negative, regardless of strength