concerned with the nature of the speed accuracy trade-off in manual control ( Fitts, 1954 ; Meyer et al., 1982 ; Schmidt et al., 1979 ). In two experiments participants were required to perform several Fitts’ law tasks as well as linear speed accuracy trade-off tasks. The Fitts tasks required individuals
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The Past and Future of Clock-Like Timing in Motor Performance
Howard N. Zelaznik
Motor Control and Learning in the North American Society for the Psychology of Sport and Physical Activity (NASPSPA): The First 40 Years
Robert W. Christina
By 1967, motor control and learning researchers had adopted an information processing (IP) approach. Central to that research was understanding how movement information was processed, coded, stored, and represented in memory. It also was centered on understanding motor control and learning in terms of Fitts’ law, closed-loop and schema theories, motor programs, contextual interference, modeling, mental practice, attentional focus, and how practice and augmented feedback could be organized to optimize learning. Our constraints-based research from the 1980s into the 2000s searched for principles of “self-organization”, and answers to the degrees-of-freedom problem, that is, how the human motor system with so many independent parts could be controlled without the need for an executive decision maker as proposed by the IP approach. By 2007 we were thinking about where the IP and constraints-based views were divergent and complementary, and whether neural-based models could bring together the behavior and biological mechanisms underlying the processes of motor control and learning.
Children, Young Adults, and Older Adults Choose Different Fast Learning Strategies
Dalia Mickeviciene, Renata Rutkauskaite, Dovile Valanciene, Diana Karanauskiene, Marius Brazaitis, and Albertas Skurvydas
, one more motor control determinant becomes an important “player”: variability of motor performance. According to Harris and Wolpert ( 1998 ), minimum-variance theory accurately predicts the trajectories of movements and the speed–accuracy trade-off described by Fitts’ law. Moreover, Bertucco, Bhanpuri
Human Movement: In Search of Borderlands Between Philosophy and Physics
Scott Kretchmar and Mark L. Latash
performed by psychologists, one of the established laws is the Fitts’ law ( Fitts, 1954 ), which links movement time (MT) to an index of task difficulty (ID) computed as the ratio of movement distance to target size: MT = a + b ·log(ID), where a and b are constants. Fitts’ law has been confirmed
Age Differences in a Combined Walking and Grasping Task
Andrea H. Mason, Alejandra S. Padilla, and Kristen A. Pickett
perceptual (visual) contact with the environment is an important contributor to task difficulty for postural tasks. No differences in gait performance were observed for either group when they grasped the small compared to the large object. Fitts’ Law ( Fitts, 1954 ) suggests that a smaller target has a
