HK 258 Lecture 2 - Information Processing

Motor Skills

Tasks in which a person must orchestrate his/her effectors (limbs and muscle) to achieve a delineated goal

Things that are NOT examples of motor skills

walking, chewing, breathing

Motor skills require

deliberate practice or extensive practice

How are skills performed?

Motor Control

How are skills acquired?

Motor learning

The brain’s main task is to

control actions

Almost all behaviors involvee skilled actions or hardware controlled actions suh as

breathing

Cognitive skills

the person must know or learn, what to do

quality of movement is not relevant

chess is a good example

In motor skills, the person must

learn or know how to do it (ex: pole vaulting)

Theories are

explanations of a particular description

Theories have

hypothesis - which are specific expectations how variables are related

Components of skills

perceiving the relevant environmental information

deciding what to do, when to do it

organizing instructions to muscles to carry out action to achieve goal

Components of information processing

stimulus identificaiton

response selection

response execution (motor programming)

Not all skills are the same, they are just the same

processes

Stable environments are the domain of

closed skills

Unstable environments are the domain of

open skills

Golf is an example of a

closed skill

Why is free throw shooting a closed skill

the rim is fixed at 10 feet high and the performer is 15 feet from the rim. nothing else matters

Open skills

playing soccer, wresting, chasing a rabbit

Discrete Skills

skills with clear starting and stopping points

limited duration (less than 1s)

very popular in most sport skills

Examples of discrete skills

baseball batting

kicking during a penalty kick

Continuous skills

No definite beginning or end

longer duration

cyclical movements

Examples of continuous skills

swimming

walking

Serial skills

set of discrete skills performed in sequence

With practice _____ skills become united into one action

serial

Examples of serial skills

keyboarding

manual shifting in automobile driving

piano playing