Task 7 skill learning

Question 1

Talent

Answer 1

A persons genetically endowed ability to perform a skill better than most
o The more practice people have, the more their performance depends on genetical factors

Question 2

Cognitive skill

Answer 2

A skill that requires problem solving or the application of strategies rather than performing physical movements (can also become motor programs) (playing cards)

Question 3

Perceptual-motor skills

Answer 3

Learned movement patterns guided by sensory inputs (more likely to be implicit learned) (drinking out of glass)

Question 4

Closed skill

Answer 4

A skill that involves performing predefined movements that, ideally, never vary

Question 5

Open skills

Answer 5

A skill in which movements are made on the basis of predictions about changing demands of the environment

Question 6

Knowledge of result

Answer 6

Feedback about performance of a skill, critical to the effectiveness of practice

Question 7

Power law of practice

Answer 7

A law stating that the degree to which a practice trail improves performance diminishes after a certain point, so that additional trails are needed to further improvement; learning occurs quickly at first, then slows

Question 8

Observed learning

Answer 8

observing e.g. a movement and using the obtained knowledge to improve your skill

Question 9

Massed practice

Answer 9

Concentrated continuous practice of a skill

Question 10

Spaced practice

Answer 10

Practice of a skill that is spread out over several sessions (leads to better retention in the long run)

Question 11

constant practice

Answer 11

Practise involving a constrained set of materials and skills

Question 12

variable practice

Answer 12

Practice involving the performance of skills in a wide variety of context (takes longer but is mostly superior)
o Improvement is increases if difficulty is going to be increased

Question 13

explicit learning

Answer 13

A learning process that includes the ability to verbalize about the actions or events being learned

Question 14

Implicit learning

Answer 14

Learning that occurs without the learners awareness of improvements in performance or, in the case of people with amnesia, awareness that practice has occurred

Question 15

Three stages of skill learning

Answer 15

o Cognitive stage: first stage in Fitts skill learning. In this stage, an individual must exert some effort to encode the skill on the basis of information gained through observation, instruction and trail and error
o Associative stage: second stage of fitts skill learning. Learners begin to use stereotyped actions when performing a skill and rely less on actively recalled memories of rules
o Autonomous stage: third stage of fitts skill learning. A skill or subcomponents of the skill become motor programs so you can perform them without effort, and you could talk next to it

Question 16

Transfer specificity

Answer 16

The restricted applicability of learned skill to specific situations

Question 17

Identical elements theory

Answer 17

Thorndike’s proposal that learned abilities transfer to novel situations to an extent that depends on the numbers of elements in the new situation that are identical to those in the situation in which the skill were encoded

Question 18

Learning set formation

Answer 18

Acquisition of the ability to learn novel tasks rapidly based on frequent experiences with similar tasks

Question 19

Skill decay

Answer 19

Loss of skill because of non-use (may be impossible to distinguish whether someone knows how to perform a skill but has impaired movement abilities or whether the person has forgotten how to perform the skill)

Question 20

Overshadowing

Answer 20

• Skills can be overshadowed by a second learned directly after the first

Question 21

Water rats experiment

Answer 21

One interpretation of this finding is that rats with basal ganglia damage have difficulty learning to swim toward a platform to escape the water (even when the platform is clearly visible) and instead learn to swim to a particular location in the tank to escape the water

Question 22

Musician dystonia

Answer 22

extensive practice playing an instrument can lead to a reduction or loss of motor control, motor areas shrink or increase and s reorganize the somanotopic organisation

Question 23

Parkinson disease

Answer 23

A disorder resulting from disruptions in the normal functioning of the basal ganglia and progressive deterioration of motor control and perceptual-motor skill learning.
o Parkinson’s disease may selectively disrupt circuits in the basal ganglia that contribute to the learning and performance of closed skills, especially those that have reached the autonomous stage of learning, where movements normally would be automatic

Question 24

Deep brain stimulation

Answer 24

A procedure that delivers an electrical current into a patient’s brain through one or more implanted electrodes; used to alleviate tremors and other motor symptoms associated with Parkinson’s disease, quites brain regions that are fixed on one communication

Question 25

Huntington diseas

Answer 25

large deficit in perceptual motor skills, quite similar to Parkinson, genes play a bigger role, cerebral cortex and cerebral cortex in impaired.
o Basal ganglia is over active (too much dopamine)

Question 26

Basal ganglia

Answer 26

receives input from the whole brain to organize what is happening (most critical for linking sensory events to responses)
o By modulating the motor circuit between thalamus and motor cortex, the basal ganglia plays a role in initiating and maintaining movement
o Synaptic plasticity may enables learning

Question 27

Neural activity during T-maze

Answer 27

A sound leads the rat to turn right
 (1) some neurons fired most at the start of a trial, when the rat was first released into the maze; (2) some fired most when the instructional sound was broadcast; (3) some responded strongly when the rat turned right or left; and (4) some fired at the end of a trial, when the rat received food

Question 28

Changes during learning in basal ganglia

Answer 28

o neural activity in the basal ganglia changes during the learning of a perceptual-motor skill, suggesting that encoding or control of skills by the basal ganglia changes as learning progresses.

Question 29

Brain activity during cognitive skill learning

Answer 29

Basal ganglia is active

Question 30

Cortical expansion

Answer 30

o Regions of the cerebral cortex involved in performing a particular skill often expand in area with practice, while regions that are less relevant to the skill show fewer changes
o Can change amount of grey matter
o perceptual-motor skill learning is often associated with expansion of representations within the sensory cortex involved in performing the skill

Question 31

Cortical activity

Answer 31

the part of the motor cortex activated during performance of the task expands rapidly during the first training session and more gradually in later sessions

Question 32

Cerebral cortex

Answer 32

most critical for controlling complex action sequences

Question 33

Cerebellum

Answer 33

important for skills which require timing, tracing, aiming

Question 34

mirror tracing

Answer 34

An experimental task that requires individuals to trace drawings by watching a mirror image of their hand and the figure to be traced, with the hand and figure concealed; used to test perceptual-motor skill learning. (damage to cerebellum impairs this)

Question 35

Mirror reading

Answer 35

: An experimental task that requires individuals to read mirror-reversed text; used to test cognitive skill learning. (cerebellar activity in the left hemisphere decreases, in the right hemisphere increase)

Question 36

Contribution of NMDA receptors

Answer 36

change in the latent phase, contributes to LTP (offline consolidation late LTP)

Question 37

latent phase

Answer 37

first 8 hours of the fast learning phase, this is where perceptual skills emerge

Question 38

offline consolidation

Answer 38

improving in a task just by time after training of the skill, due to structural changes in the brain

Question 39

Serial reaction time task

Answer 39

An experimental task that requires individuals to press keys in specific sequences on the basis of cues provided by a computer; used to study implicit memory
o Sequence might repeat but participant is not aware of it, so learning is implicit

Question 40

Rotary pursuit task

Answer 40

An experimental task that requires individuals to keep the end of a pointed stick (stylus) above a fixed point on a rotating disk; used to study perceptual-motor skill learning.

Question 41

Radial maze

Answer 41

the maze with different arms with food at the end where rats only visit them once after training because of place cells (hippocampal lesions disable this)