Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Proteau, Luc
• Marteniuk, Ronald G.
• Lévesque, Line

Titel

A Sensorimotor Basis for Motor Learning: Evidence Indicating Specificity of Practice

Ist Teil von

• The Quarterly journal of experimental psychology. A, Human experimental psychology, 1992-04, Vol.44 (3), p.557-575

Ort / Verlag

London, England: Taylor & Francis Group

Erscheinungsjahr

1992

Quelle

Taylor & Francis

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Our previous work (Proteau, Marteniuk, Girouard, & Dugas, 1987) was concerned with determining whether with relatively extensive practice on a movement aiming task, as the skill theoretically starts becoming open-loop, there would be evidence for a decreasing emphasis on visual feedback for motor control. We eliminated vision of the moving limb after moderate and extensive practice and found that the movement became more dependent on this feedback with greater amounts of practice. In the present study, we wished to test the hypothesis, developed from our previous work, that at the base of movement learning is a sensorimotor representation that consists of integrated information from central processes and sensory feedback derived from previous experiences on the movement task. A strong test of this hypothesis would be the prediction that for an aiming task, the addition of vision, after moderate and relatively extensive practice without vision, would lead to an increasingly large movement decrement, relative to appropriate controls. We found good support for this prediction. From these and previous results, and the idea of the sensorimotor representation underlying learning, we develop the idea that learning is specific to the conditions that prevail during skill acquisition. This has implications for the ideas of generalized motor program and schema theory.