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Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis 1980The study compared the acquisition, generalization, transfer, and maintenance of language comprehension and production responses by persons at two IQ levels: mentally...
The study compared the acquisition, generalization, transfer, and maintenance of language comprehension and production responses by persons at two IQ levels: mentally retarded (N=10) and nonretarded (N=10). The two levels of the IQ Level factor were combined factorially with two levels of a Training Condition factor: Comprehension-Production and Production Only. Participants in the former groups were trained sequentially to (a) comprehend coin labels by pointing and then (b) produce verbally the correct coin label. Participants in the Production Only groups were trained on the latter response only. A three-factor mixed design with one repeated measure plus a multiple baseline across coin responses was employed. Results indicated that both mentally retarded and nonretarded subjects attained a high level of acquisition and maintained their performance on 1- and 4-week follow-up tests. No difference occurred between mentally retarded and nonretarded participants in magnitude of acquisition, but the mentally retarded groups took approximately three times as many trials to complete training. Data also suggested, contrary to past research, that generalization from comprehension to production was bidirectional, with no difference in magnitude between mentally retarded and nonretarded subjects. Transfer from comprehension to production occurred in both nonretarded and retarded subjects; comprehension training facilitated a savings of trials in production training. These results show that language differences between retarded and nonretarded persons are quantitative rather than qualitative as some past research may have suggested.
Topics: Adolescent; Child, Preschool; Concept Formation; Education of Intellectually Disabled; Female; Generalization, Psychological; Humans; Intelligence; Male; Speech Perception; Speech Production Measurement; Transfer, Psychology
PubMed: 7380754
DOI: 10.1901/jaba.1980.13-315 -
The Tohoku Journal of Experimental... May 2020Motor skill practice improves performance not only in the trained - but also in the untrained contralateral limb - a phenomenon called as interlimb transfer. Handedness...
Motor skill practice improves performance not only in the trained - but also in the untrained contralateral limb - a phenomenon called as interlimb transfer. Handedness affects motor skill acquisition and interlimb transfer, but it remains unknown whether handedness affects interlimb transfer when practicing with the dominant or non-dominant limb. We have hypothesized that interlimb transfer of skill acquisition differs between left- and right-handed participants, and that right- as compared with left-hand motor skill practice shows greater interlimb transfer, regardless of handedness. Strongly left-hand (n = 12, aged 27.3 ± 4.4 years; 3 female) and right-hand dominant (n = 12, 20.7 ± 3.8 years; 5 female) subjects with no history of neurological or orthopedic disorders performed the grooved pegboard test before and after 4 blocks of practice on the same apparatus. Subjects were timed on their speed of the task. Right-handed subjects failed to improve manual performance in their right hand after right- or left-hand motor practice. In contrast, they showed improvement on the left hand in each condition. These data suggest greater interlimb transfer after right-hand motor skill practice, but no interlimb transfer after left-hand practice. On the other hand, our results show consistent interlimb transfer effects in left-handed subjects, irrespective of whether the dominant left or the non-dominant right arm has been initially trained. In conclusion, our results add to the body of literature by detecting the differences in the magnitude of motor skill acquisition and interlimb transfer between left- and right-handed subjects after short-term unilateral motor skill practice.
Topics: Adult; Female; Functional Laterality; Humans; Male; Motor Skills; Practice, Psychological; Psychomotor Performance; Transfer, Psychology; Young Adult
PubMed: 32434999
DOI: 10.1620/tjem.251.31 -
PloS One 2023The evolution of virtual reality (VR) has created the opportunity for a relatively low-cost and accessible method to practice motor skills. Previous studies have... (Randomized Controlled Trial)
Randomized Controlled Trial
The evolution of virtual reality (VR) has created the opportunity for a relatively low-cost and accessible method to practice motor skills. Previous studies have demonstrated how motor skill practice in non-immersive virtual environments transfers to physical environments. Though minimal research has investigated motor learning and transfer within immersive VR, multiple experiments provide empirical evidence of positive transfer effects. Most studies have used software engines and modified hardware to enhance the similarities between virtual and physical environments. However, many learners and practitioners currently use commercially available VR intending to enhance real-world performance, though there is very little evidence to support the notion of positive transfer for these systems. Therefore, this experiment aimed to investigate how motor skill practice using a commercially available VR system improved real-world performance and how that compared to physical practice. Participants (n = 68) were randomly selected into one of two groups: virtual reality (VR) practice (n = 33) or real-world (RW) practice (n = 35). The experiment occurred over two consecutive days, with a pretest, posttest, and practice phase occurring each day. The pre- and post-testing phases were identical for both groups and consisted of putting a golf ball 10 times on a carpeted surface towards the center of a target. The practice phases consisted of 60 total putts per day in the respective environment (VR or RW). Participants continuously alternated golf putting holes from three different distances until they accrued 60 total putts. Participants in the RW group performed golf putts to three targets. Participants in the VR group also performed golf putts on three different miniature golf putting holes, using the commercially available Oculus Rift and the Cloudlands VR Minigolf game. The VR putting targets were designed to replicate the putting holes in the physical environment. Separate 2 (group) x 4 (test) repeated measures ANOVAs were used to assess accuracy and club head kinematics. The results revealed a significant main effect for test, but not for group. Post hoc analyses revealed that both groups significantly improved their putting accuracy and club head kinematics at similar rates. The results from this study indicate that the transfer of learning that occurred as a result of practicing in a commercially available VR environment was similarly effective when compared to RW practice.
Topics: Humans; Learning; Motor Skills; Software; Transfer, Psychology; Virtual Reality
PubMed: 37788277
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0279856 -
Neuron Mar 2018Previous research has shown that mental rehearsal can improve performance. A new study by Vyas et al. (2018) reveals that direct modulation of neural dynamics using a...
Previous research has shown that mental rehearsal can improve performance. A new study by Vyas et al. (2018) reveals that direct modulation of neural dynamics using a brain-computer interface can also modify physical movements. The study further demonstrates that "mental practice" and physical movements share a common neural subspace.
Topics: Learning; Movement; Population Dynamics; Transfer, Psychology
PubMed: 29518363
DOI: 10.1016/j.neuron.2018.02.017 -
PloS One 2013Observers often fail to notice even dramatic changes to their environment, a phenomenon known as change blindness. If training could enhance change detection performance...
Observers often fail to notice even dramatic changes to their environment, a phenomenon known as change blindness. If training could enhance change detection performance in general, then it might help to remedy some real-world consequences of change blindness (e.g. failing to detect hazards while driving). We examined whether adaptive training on a simple change detection task could improve the ability to detect changes in untrained tasks for young and older adults. Consistent with an effective training procedure, both young and older adults were better able to detect changes to trained objects following training. However, neither group showed differential improvement on untrained change detection tasks when compared to active control groups. Change detection training led to improvements on the trained task but did not generalize to other change detection tasks.
Topics: Adolescent; Adult; Aged; Aged, 80 and over; Automobile Driving; Education; Humans; Task Performance and Analysis; Transfer, Psychology; Young Adult
PubMed: 23840775
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0067781 -
PloS One 2021Learning transfer is widely present in the learning of all kinds of knowledge, skills and social norms, and is one of the important phenomena of learning, and the...
Learning transfer is widely present in the learning of all kinds of knowledge, skills and social norms, and is one of the important phenomena of learning, and the reasonable use of transfer is conducive to improving the learning effect of students and the quality of teaching. This study starts from the data of college students' academic performance, takes real students' academic performance as a sample, measures the relevance of courses through students' academic performance, constructs various networks of learning transfer, and studies the topology and evolution of the networks to clarify the essential laws of learning transfer and put forward suggestions for the optimization of teaching strategies. Finally, using complex network analysis to analyze and mine the data on college students' academic performance, the article quantifies the overall structure of the courses and their hidden connections in a global and dynamic manner, and discovers the inheritance relationship between the courses, the clustering characteristics and the basic pattern of learning transfer. It also provides a platform for exploring the differences in the course structure of different majors and the learning transfer of male and female students.
Topics: Female; Humans; Models, Theoretical; Physical Education and Training; Sports; Students; Transfer, Psychology
PubMed: 33406144
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0243906 -
Exercise and Sport Sciences Reviews Jan 2010Recent studies on the neural bases of sensorimotor adaptation demonstrate that the cerebellar and striatal thalamocortical pathways contribute to early learning.... (Review)
Review
Recent studies on the neural bases of sensorimotor adaptation demonstrate that the cerebellar and striatal thalamocortical pathways contribute to early learning. Transfer of learning involves a reduction in the contribution of early learning networks and increased reliance on the cerebellum. The neural correlates of learning to learn remain to be determined but likely involve enhanced functioning of the general aspects of early learning.
Topics: Humans; Learning; Motor Skills; Nervous System Physiological Phenomena; Transfer, Psychology
PubMed: 20016293
DOI: 10.1097/JES.0b013e3181c5cce7 -
Journal of Neurophysiology Mar 2017When training bimanual skills, such as playing piano, people sometimes practice each hand separately and at a later stage combine the movements of the two hands. This...
When training bimanual skills, such as playing piano, people sometimes practice each hand separately and at a later stage combine the movements of the two hands. This poses the critical question of whether motor skills can be acquired by separately practicing each subcomponent or should be trained as a whole. In the present study, we addressed this question by training human subjects for 4 days in a unimanual or bimanual version of the discrete sequence production task. Both groups were then tested on trained and untrained sequences on both unimanual and bimanual versions of the task. Surprisingly, we found no evidence of transfer from trained unimanual to bimanual or from trained bimanual to unimanual sequences. In half the participants, we also investigated whether cuing the sequences on the left and right hand with unique letters would change transfer. With these cues, untrained sequences that shared some components with the trained sequences were performed more quickly than sequences that did not. However, the amount of this transfer was limited to ∼10% of the overall sequence-specific learning gains. These results suggest that unimanual and bimanual sequences are learned in separate representations. Making participants aware of the interrelationship between sequences can induce some transferrable component, although the main component of the skill remains unique to unimanual or bimanual execution. Studies in reaching movement demonstrated that approximately half of motor learning can transfer across unimanual and bimanual contexts, suggesting that neural representations for unimanual and bimanual movements are fairly overlapping at the level of elementary movement. In this study, we show that little or no transfer occurred across unimanual and bimanual sequential finger movements. This result suggests that bimanual sequences are represented at a level of the motor hierarchy that integrates movements of both hands.
Topics: Adult; Female; Fingers; Generalization, Psychological; Humans; Male; Motor Skills; Transfer, Psychology; Young Adult
PubMed: 27974447
DOI: 10.1152/jn.00387.2016 -
Memory & Cognition Jul 2019Is the capacity of short-term memory fixed, or does it improve with practice? It is already known that training on complex working memory tasks is more likely to...
Is the capacity of short-term memory fixed, or does it improve with practice? It is already known that training on complex working memory tasks is more likely to transfer to untrained tasks with similar properties, but this approach has not been extended to the more basic short-term memory system responsible for verbal serial recall. Here we investigated this with adaptive training algorithms widely applied in working memory training. Serial recall of visually presented digits was found to improve over the course of 20 training sessions, but this improvement did not extend to recall of either spoken digits or visually presented letters. In contrast, training on a nonserial visual short-term memory color change detection task did transfer to a line orientation change detection task. We suggest that training only generates substantial transfer when the unfamiliar demands of the training activities require the development of novel routines that can then be applied to untrained versions of the same paradigm (Gathercole, Dunning, Holmes, & Norris, 2019). In contrast, serial recall of digits is fully supported by the existing verbal short-term memory system and does not require the development of new routines.
Topics: Adolescent; Adult; Color Perception; Humans; Memory, Short-Term; Mental Recall; Pattern Recognition, Visual; Practice, Psychological; Serial Learning; Speech Perception; Transfer, Psychology; Young Adult
PubMed: 30815843
DOI: 10.3758/s13421-019-00901-z -
Neuron Mar 2018Covert motor learning can sometimes transfer to overt behavior. We investigated the neural mechanism underlying transfer by constructing a two-context paradigm. Subjects...
Covert motor learning can sometimes transfer to overt behavior. We investigated the neural mechanism underlying transfer by constructing a two-context paradigm. Subjects performed cursor movements either overtly using arm movements, or covertly via a brain-machine interface that moves the cursor based on motor cortical activity (in lieu of arm movement). These tasks helped evaluate whether and how cortical changes resulting from "covert rehearsal" affect overt performance. We found that covert learning indeed transfers to overt performance and is accompanied by systematic population-level changes in motor preparatory activity. Current models of motor cortical function ascribe motor preparation to achieving initial conditions favorable for subsequent movement-period neural dynamics. We found that covert and overt contexts share these initial conditions, and covert rehearsal manipulates them in a manner that persists across context changes, thus facilitating overt motor learning. This transfer learning mechanism might provide new insights into other covert processes like mental rehearsal.
Topics: Animals; Brain-Computer Interfaces; Learning; Macaca mulatta; Male; Motor Cortex; Photic Stimulation; Psychomotor Performance; Transfer, Psychology
PubMed: 29456026
DOI: 10.1016/j.neuron.2018.01.040