the aim of this research was to investigate the effect of observing animated model, static images and combined model on motor learning of handstand balance skill. 45 subjects (mean age 8.03±1.7 yr) were randomly divided into three experimental groups: observation of animated model, static images, combined model. subjects trained handstand balance skill for three weeks (three sessions per week)....

22 A complex interplay has been demonstrated between motor and sensory systems. We 23 have recently shown that motor learning leads to changes in the sensed position of the 24 limb (Ostry et al. 2010). Here, we document further the links between motor learning and 25 changes in somatosensory perception. To study motor learning, we used a force field 26 paradigm in which subjects learn to compen...

Movement is essential to human life because it provides us with the freedom of mobility and the power to affect our surroundings. Moreover, movements are vital to communication: from hand and finger movements when writing, mouth and throat movements when speaking, to painting, dancing, and other forms of artistic self expression. As people grow and experience new environments, adaptively mainta...

Emerging evidence suggests that sleep plays a key role in procedural learning, particularly in the continued development of motor skill learning following initial acquisition. We argue that a detailed examination of the time course of performance across sleep on the finger-tapping task, established as the paradigm for studying the effect of sleep on motor learning, will help distinguish a resto...

It is no secret that motor learning benefits from repetition. For example, pianists devote countless hours to performing complicated sequences of key presses, and golfers practice their swings thousands of times to reach a level of proficiency. Interestingly, the subsequent waking and sleeping hours after practice also play important roles in motor learning. During this time, a motor skill can ...

Sleep is hypothesized to play a functional role in the consolidation of memory, with more robust findings for implicit, than explicit memory. Previous studies have observed improvements on an explicit motor task after a sleep period. We examined the role of massed practice and sleep on implicit and explicit learning within a motor task. Controlling for non-sleep factors (e.g. massed practice, c...

Previous analyses of knowledge of results (KR) and motor learning have generally confounded the transient performance effects as shown when KR is present and the relatively permanent (i.e., learned) effects that we argue should be evaluated on a transfer test without KR. In this review, we classify investigations according to this distinction, and a number of new relations emerge between KR and...

Neurophysiological and behavioural research has linked observational practice (OP) to a mirroring mechanism encompassing the action-observation network (AON). Although, the original findings indicate that biological stimuli alone activate the AON, recent evidence has shown sensitivity to non-biological stimuli. Thus, the AON is suggested to be influenced by interacting bottom-up and top-down pr...

The capacity for skill development over multiple training episodes is fundamental to human motor function. We have studied the process by which skills evolve with training by progressively modifying a series of motor learning tasks that subjects performed over a 1-mo period. In a series of empirical and modeling studies, we show that performance undergoes repeated modification with new learning...

In humans, training in which good performance is rewarded or bad performance punished results in transient behavioral improvements. The relative effects of reward and punishment on consolidation and long-term retention, critical behavioral stages for successful learning, are not known. Here, we investigated the effects of reward and punishment on these different stages of human motor skill lear...