We examined the controlling factors that allow a prompted skill to become autonomous in a discrete-trials implementation of Touchette's (1971) progressively delayed prompting procedure, but our subjects were rats rather than children with disabilities. Our prompted skill was a left-right lever-press sequence guided by two panel lights. We manipulated (a) the effectiveness of the guiding lights ...

Why are performance trade-offs so rarely detected in animals when their underlying physiological basis seems so intuitive? One possibility is that individual variation in health, fitness, nutrition, development or genetics, or 'individual quality', makes some individuals better or worse performers across all motor tasks. If this is the case, then correcting for individual quality should reveal ...

Transfer (i.e., the application of a learned skill in a novel context) is an important and desirable outcome of motor skill learning. While much research has been devoted to understanding transfer of explicit skills the mechanisms of skill transfer after incidental learning remain poorly understood. The aim of this study was to (1) examine the effect of practice schedule on transfer and (2) inv...

Clinical question. EIT-013B-In BLS providers (lay or HCP) requiring AED training (P), are there any specific training interventions (I) compared with traditional lecture/practice sessions (C) that increase outcomes (eg. skill acquisition and retention, actual AED use, etc.) (O)? Is this question addressing an intervention/therapy, prognosis or diagnosis? Intervention State if this is a proposed...

This study investigated acquisition of a mirror-reading skill via imagery training, without the actual performance of a mirror-reading task. In experiment I, healthy volunteers simulated writing on an imaginary, transparent screen placed at eye level, which could be read by an experimenter facing the subject. Performance of this irrelevant motor task required the subject to imagine the letters ...

We used a cognitive architecture (ACT-R) to explore the procedural learning of surgical tasks and then to understand the process of perceptual motor learning and skill decay in surgical skill performance. The ACT-R cognitive model simulates declarative memory processes during motor learning. In this ongoing study, four surgical tasks (bimanual carrying, peg transfer, needle passing, and suture ...

BACKGROUND Proficiency-based curricula using both virtual reality (VR) and videotrainer (VT) simulators have proven to be efficient and maximally effective, but little is known about the retention of acquired skills. The purpose of this study was to assess skill retention after completion of a validated laparoscopic skills curriculum. METHODS Surgery residents (n=14) with no previous VR or VT...

BACKGROUND Each year 700,000 infants die due to intrapartum-related complications. Implementation of Helping Babies Breathe (HBB)-a simplified neonatal resuscitation protocol in low-resource clinical settings has shown to reduce intrapartum stillbirths and first-day neonatal mortality. However, there is a lack of evidence on the effect of different HBB implementation strategies to improve and s...