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Dissociable effects of practice variability on learning motor and timing skills

Motor skill acquisition inherently depends on the way one practices the motor task. The amount of motor task variability during practice has been shown to foster transfer of the learned skill to other similar motor tasks. In addition, variability in a learning schedule, in which a task and its varia...

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Autores principales: Caramiaux, Baptiste, Bevilacqua, Frédéric, Wanderley, Marcelo M., Palmer, Caroline
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Public Library of Science 2018
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5832267/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29494670
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0193580
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author Caramiaux, Baptiste
Bevilacqua, Frédéric
Wanderley, Marcelo M.
Palmer, Caroline
author_facet Caramiaux, Baptiste
Bevilacqua, Frédéric
Wanderley, Marcelo M.
Palmer, Caroline
author_sort Caramiaux, Baptiste
collection PubMed
description Motor skill acquisition inherently depends on the way one practices the motor task. The amount of motor task variability during practice has been shown to foster transfer of the learned skill to other similar motor tasks. In addition, variability in a learning schedule, in which a task and its variations are interweaved during practice, has been shown to help the transfer of learning in motor skill acquisition. However, there is little evidence on how motor task variations and variability schedules during practice act on the acquisition of complex motor skills such as music performance, in which a performer learns both the right movements (motor skill) and the right time to perform them (timing skill). This study investigated the impact of rate (tempo) variability and the schedule of tempo change during practice on timing and motor skill acquisition. Complete novices, with no musical training, practiced a simple musical sequence on a piano keyboard at different rates. Each novice was assigned to one of four learning conditions designed to manipulate the amount of tempo variability across trials (large or small tempo set) and the schedule of tempo change (randomized or non-randomized order) during practice. At test, the novices performed the same musical sequence at a familiar tempo and at novel tempi (testing tempo transfer), as well as two novel (but related) sequences at a familiar tempo (testing spatial transfer). We found that practice conditions had little effect on learning and transfer performance of timing skill. Interestingly, practice conditions influenced motor skill learning (reduction of movement variability): lower temporal variability during practice facilitated transfer to new tempi and new sequences; non-randomized learning schedule improved transfer to new tempi and new sequences. Tempo (rate) and the sequence difficulty (spatial manipulation) affected performance variability in both timing and movement. These findings suggest that there is a dissociable effect of practice variability on learning complex skills that involve both motor and timing constraints.
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spelling pubmed-58322672018-03-23 Dissociable effects of practice variability on learning motor and timing skills Caramiaux, Baptiste Bevilacqua, Frédéric Wanderley, Marcelo M. Palmer, Caroline PLoS One Research Article Motor skill acquisition inherently depends on the way one practices the motor task. The amount of motor task variability during practice has been shown to foster transfer of the learned skill to other similar motor tasks. In addition, variability in a learning schedule, in which a task and its variations are interweaved during practice, has been shown to help the transfer of learning in motor skill acquisition. However, there is little evidence on how motor task variations and variability schedules during practice act on the acquisition of complex motor skills such as music performance, in which a performer learns both the right movements (motor skill) and the right time to perform them (timing skill). This study investigated the impact of rate (tempo) variability and the schedule of tempo change during practice on timing and motor skill acquisition. Complete novices, with no musical training, practiced a simple musical sequence on a piano keyboard at different rates. Each novice was assigned to one of four learning conditions designed to manipulate the amount of tempo variability across trials (large or small tempo set) and the schedule of tempo change (randomized or non-randomized order) during practice. At test, the novices performed the same musical sequence at a familiar tempo and at novel tempi (testing tempo transfer), as well as two novel (but related) sequences at a familiar tempo (testing spatial transfer). We found that practice conditions had little effect on learning and transfer performance of timing skill. Interestingly, practice conditions influenced motor skill learning (reduction of movement variability): lower temporal variability during practice facilitated transfer to new tempi and new sequences; non-randomized learning schedule improved transfer to new tempi and new sequences. Tempo (rate) and the sequence difficulty (spatial manipulation) affected performance variability in both timing and movement. These findings suggest that there is a dissociable effect of practice variability on learning complex skills that involve both motor and timing constraints. Public Library of Science 2018-03-01 /pmc/articles/PMC5832267/ /pubmed/29494670 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0193580 Text en © 2018 Caramiaux et al http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
spellingShingle Research Article
Caramiaux, Baptiste
Bevilacqua, Frédéric
Wanderley, Marcelo M.
Palmer, Caroline
Dissociable effects of practice variability on learning motor and timing skills
title Dissociable effects of practice variability on learning motor and timing skills
title_full Dissociable effects of practice variability on learning motor and timing skills
title_fullStr Dissociable effects of practice variability on learning motor and timing skills
title_full_unstemmed Dissociable effects of practice variability on learning motor and timing skills
title_short Dissociable effects of practice variability on learning motor and timing skills
title_sort dissociable effects of practice variability on learning motor and timing skills
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5832267/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29494670
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0193580
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