Kin 158 Exam 1

A learned, goal-directed activity entailing a broad range of human behaviors.

• Cognitive Skills : A skill for which success is primarily determined by an individual’s knowledge and cognitive capabilities.
• Perceptual Skill : A skill for which the ability to discern and discriminate among sensory stimuli is of primary concern in successfully accomplishing the skill.
• Motor Skills : A learned, goal-directed activity accomplished primarily through muscular contributions to action.

• transfer specificity 
• learning rates
• learning stages
• individual differences in skill performance
• importance of imagery 
• involvement in neural substrates 
• similar training effects

practicing one skill has little (if any) effect on other skills

similar patterns described by same mathematical power function rules.

learners progress through same stages regardless of skill domain.

correlation with how well individuals perform any two dissimilar skills.

recent research revealed importance of imagery in all three domains.

there is not a lot of differentiation between areas of the brain. (ex. cerebellum is involved in all three domains).

practice distribution effects, effectiveness of varied practice scheduling, and the roles of instruction and feedback.

• The Person - attributes of individual play an important role in shaping the performance of motor skills.
• The Task - skill tasks vary widely in their goals and in movement demands placed upon performers.
• The Environment - Where will a motor skill be performed? What is the environmental context of performance?

Motor learning- The study of the processes involved in learning new motor skills, and the study of the processes of the variables that promote or inhibit learning them.

Motor control- The study of the neural, behavioral, environmental, and synergistic mechanism responsible for human movement and stability.

Similarities? They both focus on the factors that develop skilled physical behaviors in humans and the factors that help them execute them.

the learner- i.e. age, sex, physical condition, intelligence, psychological characteristics, and existing skill level

the skill to be learned- different skills need to be taught different ways, and the instructor has to be knowledgeable about how to do so.

the conditions under which the skill is learned (the environment)

social- whether it’s practiced alone or with others, the instructor-learning relationship, and what the experience is like

environmental- availability of equipment, physical features of the environment, time of day, lighting conditions, and environmental distractions.

1897-1966/1970 : Russian Nikolai Bernstein evolved contemporary theories on motor control and learning

early

• 1874-1949 Edward Thorndike was the most influential person in psychological developments that impact the learning of motor skills. He developed the Law of Effect- when behaviors are rewarded they are repeated.
• EARLY

1904-1992 : Franklin Henry most responsible person for the evolution of motor learning as an academic field of study. He also caused a large expansion of physical education programs in the 1950’s and 60’s

middle

Motor Equivalence

Motor Variability

Motor Consistency

Motor Modifiability

Motor Equivalence : The capacity to produce many different movement patterns to accomplish the same action goal. (ex. turning on a lightswitch with your elbow).

Motor Variability : No two movement patterns, even of the same skill, are ever produced in exactly the same way. (ex. actions are never completed in exactly the same way).

Motor Consistency : The capacity to achieve the goals of motor skills consistently; the capacity of the human motor system to learn. (ex. a baseball pitcher never uses the same neural pathways in throwing a fastball, yet his fastball is consistent in striking out batters).

Motor Modifiability : The capacity to alter a movement pattern to achieve a new action goal. (the ability to change an action quickly once it has begun). (ex. bball player starting to take a shot and then quickly changing her actions to pass the ball to a teammate).

Hypothesis : is an educated guess based upon previous observations.

Theory : Summarizes a significant group of hypotheses that have supported the same conclusions about something through repeated testing.

Law : generalizes a large body of scientific observations, usually of many experiments over a substantial period of time, that have tested something in a broad diversity of ways.

Closed Control System : A system in which the mechanisms of control are internal and closed to influences outside of the system itself.


Open Control System : A system that interacts the the environment outside of itself and responds to external influences in its mechanisms of control.

Closed-loop control system : A system of control in which feedback is compared to a reference of correctness during the course of action and errors corrected when necessary. Slow and deliberate (ex. driving a car, threading a needle, running to catch a fly ball, etc.).

Advantage : especially appropriate when performing unpracticed skills.

Advantage : allowing movements to be corrected after they’ve begun.

Advantage : results in precise and accurate movements.

Disadvantage : Attention demanding

Disadvantage : time required to correct an ongoing action.

Open-loop control system : A system of control in which movement commands are pre structured and executed without corrective intervention from feedback. Quickly and automatically (ex. computer program).

Advantage : quick movement

Advantage : attentional resources can be directed to other tasks

Disadvantage : Not effective for unpracticed/not well learned skills

Disadvantage : Not effective in changing environments

Motor Program : A procedural memory comprised of the rules commanding muscular activity for producing specific skills.

• -is a structure that is centrally located
• -consists of a hierarchical arrangement of elements
• -is sufficient to explain the learning and control of movement skills

***represents a “top-down” system of control. - The brain is the boss and the muscles are the workers.

Synergy : A grouping of joints, muscles, and cells that temporarily cooperate in acting together as a single collective action unit; can be assembled and unassembled as the need arises; also called a coordinate structure.

He was the first to identify the problems with cognitive-based approaches that are the impetus for dynamical systems theory.

1. Context-conditioned variability problem : He recognized that the control of movement could not be reduced simply to a central mechanism of control responsible for commanding all muscle actions directly, but must take into account other forces acting on the moving body such as inertia, reactive forces, and gravitational and centripetal forces. 

2. Degrees of freedom problem : (PAGE 48)How the many degrees of freedom available in the human motor system are controlled to produce a particular movement.

Central Nervous System: all nerve cells within the brain and spine

Peripheral Nervous System: nerve cells everywhere else

• CNS
• motor neurons carry efferent signals to the muscles or nerves they innervate, conveying commands to carry out

• interneurons are most of the neurons in the CNS that have 2 roles
• -1- link motor, sensory, and higher brain centers together
• 2-responsibly for abstract features of the nervous system, creating “The mind” i.e. emotions, memory, creativity, intellect, motivation, etc.  

• PNS
• sensory neurons carry afferent signals to the CNS about information from the environment and within the body

Action potential: a charge causing on/off connections

-polarization is the rest phase where the ions on both sides of the cell are equal

-depolarization is the action/excitation phase where the inside of the cell are mostly positive

-sodium pump: pumps positive ions back to the outside of the cell

Synapse: the juncture between neurons

-the action potential starts at the end of the presynaptic neuron (synaptic knob) and jumps across the synaptic cleft to the postsynaptic neuron. This is called synaptic transmission.

this is where the treatments of the underlying causes of motor-related problems and diseases happen

Neurotransmitters: contained in the synaptic knob influence the transmission of the impulse across the synaptic gap (increase or decrease chances of depolarization

Acetylcholine is most common

Others: norepinephrine, epinephrine (adrenaline), dopamine, serotonin, glutamine, and GABA

Medulla: Regulates respiration, blood pressure, heart rate

Pons: routes ascending signals to upper brain components (“cross-over” relay station)

Reticular formation: prioritizes incoming sensory signals and eliminates dumb information from further processing. also controls alertness and arousal levels

cerebellum: coordinates and plans voluntary muscular skills, maintains balance, monitors feedback from ongoing movements and initiates corrective actions, maintains muscle tone, helps with synchronization

hippocampus; retains working memory of ongoing movements, plays essential role in consolidation of long term memories

hypothalamus controls body temperature, regulates energy use, links brain and endocrine system, helps regulate emotions and behavioral patterns

thalamus: relays all sensory inputs to somatosensory cortex, reinforces voluntary motor behaviors initiated by higher brain centers

basal ganglia: plays role in the planning and execution of motor skills, involved in preparing and stabilizing body for movement, works in concert with cerebellum to coordinate voluntary movements, coordinates in slow, sustained movement

somatosensory cortex: sensory perception, routes sensory information to motor centers of cortex, prioritizes sensory sensitivity of bodily regions

motor cortex: directly controls skeletal muscle contractions, prepares and executes the “motor program”, prioritizes complexity of motor control available to the bodily regions

supplemental cortex: intricately involved in planning and control of all voluntary movements

premotor cortex: plans and controls all voluntary movements, especially is involved in temporal organization of limb and body movements

location: in the reticular formation

action: focuses a person’s attention to specific features in the environment and bodily states, either broadly or more narrowly. this is done by blocking the communication of some information and allowing the communication of other information.

this is done by neuromodulators, which alters the release of neurotransmitters in the brain and spinal cord

the RAS system is beneficial and improves performance up to a certain point (the top of the inverted U)

beyond that, it is damaging to performance

-learning involved the forming and strengthening of neural traces in the brains cortex

1. memory trace- selects and initiates the desired action 

2. perceptual trace- evaluates the correctly of the action

novelty problem: when a person performs a movement for the first time, there is no memory trace because it hasn't been developed through previous practice. people shouldn't be able to produce unpracticed variations of a movement is memory trace was true. 

storage problem: it'd be pretty impossible to create a specific memory and perceptual trace of every single movement we create when practicing something

-a theory of motor programs that make up an abstract set of rules that can be generalized for an entire class of similar action

GMP- motor program of schema theory: an abstract representation of rules generalized to control an entire class of actions

• invariable features-the parts of a movement that remain the same, regardless of other factors 
• -muscle sequencing: same sequence of the action occurs
• -relative timing: there is a general rhythm to the way the action plays out 
• -relative force: general idea of how much force should be produced

one continuum between 2 polar opposites

happy and sad

-a skill in which an action occurs in a stable and predictable environment

-self paced skill 

typing

the skill in which the object acted upon the the context in which the action occurs is always changing

dribbling down a basketball court

• -the environment
• -temporal predictability
• -movement precision

-the environment in which a skill is performed: if the environment is the same each time you act on it, you use closed motor skills. if the environment changes and you have to react differently to achieve a skill, you used an open motor skill

-temporal predicability: being able to predict the beginning and ending points of a skill

discrete: theres a clearly predictable beginning and end point (hitting a baseball)

continuous motor skill: a motor skill in which the exact beginning and ending of the skill is unpredictable (i.e. driving or walking)

serial predictability: when discrete skills are linked together so quickly (more intermediate) that they begin to mimic a continuous skill (i.e. dancing, playing piano)

fine motor skill- precision movement

gross motor skill-more muscular force is needed

-it classifies skills on the basis of 2 factors influencing performance

• -the demands placed on the individual from the environment
• -the requirements imposed by the task itself

regulatory conditions- the features of the environment that are relevant to have successful a skill is being performed

intertrial variability-whether the regulator conditions stay the same or change from one attempt to the next

body transport: if a person has to change location when performing the skill 

object manipulation: is the manipulation of an object or other people required to perform the skill

A motor neuron that innervates skeletal muscle (also called a motorneuron).

An alpha motor neuron and all of the muscle fibers that it innervates.

All of the motor units controlling a specific muscle

Law stating that all of the muscle fibers of a motor unit will contract maximally when the motor neuron propagates sufficient stimulation, or none of the muscle fibers will contract in the absence of a sufficient action potential.