Chapter 8 Flashcards
An ability that can improve over time through practice
Skill
Learned movement patterns guided by sensory inputs
Perceptual-motor skill
A skill that requires problem solving or the application of strategies
Cognitive Skill
A skill that involves performing predefined movements, that, ideally, never vary
Closed Skill
A skill in which movements are made on the basis of predictions about changing demands of the environment
Open skill
Feedback about performance of a skill; critical of the effectiveness of practice
Knowledge of results
A law stating that the degree to which a practice trial improves performance diminishes after a certain point, so that additional trials are needed to further improve the skill; learning occurs quickly at first, then slows
Power law of practice
Concentrated continuous practice of skill
Massed practice
Practice of a skill that is spread out over several sessions
Spaced practice
Practice involving a constrained set of materials and skills
Constant Practice
Practice involving the performance of skills in a wide variety of contexts
Variable Practice
An experimental test that requires individuals to press keys in specific sequence on the basis of cues provided by a computer; used to study implicit learning
Serial reaction time task
A sequence of movements that an organism can perform automatically (with minimal attention)
Motor program
The first stage in Fitt’s model of skill learning; in this stage, an individual must exert some efforts to encode the skill on the basis of info gained through observation, instruction, and trial and error
cognitive stage
The second stage, learners begin using stereotyped actions when performing a skill and rely less on actively recalled memories of rules
Associative stage
Third stage, a skill or subcomponents of the skill become motor programs
Autonomous stage
The restricted applicability of learned skills to specific situations
Transfer specificity
Thorndike’s proposal that learned abilities transfer to novel situations to an extent that depends on the number of elements in the new situation that are identical to those in the situation in which the skills were encoded
Identical elements theory
Acquisition of the ability to learn novel tasks rapidly based on frequent experiences with similar tasks
Learning set formation
Loss of a skill because of non-use
Skill decay
An experimental task that requires individuals to trace drawings by watching a mirror image of their hand and the figure to be traces, with the hand and figure concealed, used to test perceptual-motor skill learning
mirror tracing
An experimental task that requires individuals to read mirror-reversed text; used to test cognitive skill learning
Mirror Reading
A disorder resulting from disruptions un the normal functioning of the basal ganglia and progressive deterioration of motor control and perceptual-motor skill learning
PArkinsons’s disease
A procedure that delivers an electrical current into a patients brain through one or more implanted electrodes; used to alleviate tremors and other motor symptoms associated with Parkinson’s disease
deep brain stimulation
