The purpose of this study was to examine the contextual interference eŠect modulated by skill level in the throwing of diŠerent ball types by pitchers. College and high school baseball pitchers were asked to throw straight balls and breaking balls to the outside half and lower half of the home plate. Twenty pitchers were divided into 4 groups, determined by a combination of practice order (rand...

Real-world tasks often require movements that depend on a previous action or on changes in the state of the world. Here we investigate whether motor memories encode the current action in a manner that depends on previous sensorimotor states. Human subjects performed trials in which they made movements in a randomly selected clockwise or counterclockwise velocity-dependent curl force field. Move...

The influence of contextual factors on encoding and retrieval in recognition memory was investigated using a retroactive interference paradigm. Participants were randomly assigned to four context conditions constructed by manipulating types of presentation modality (pictures vs words) for study, interference, and test stages, respectively (ABA, ABB, AAA, & AAB). In Experiment 1 we presented unr...

In the present study, the effects of two instructional strategies on the retention and transfer of procedures of different difficulty level were investigated. Difficulty level was manipulated by providing a different number of cues during training. The instructional strategies differed with respect to the amount of contextual interference. Sixty-four subjects were randomly assigned to either a ...

The anterior thalamus (AT) is anatomically interconnected with the hippocampus and other structures known to be involved in memory, and the AT is involved in many of the same learning and memory functions as the hippocampus. For example, like the hippocampus, the AT is involved in spatial cognition and episodic memory. The hippocampus also has a well-documented role in contextual memory process...

contextual interference is defined as interference in performance and learning that arise from practicing one task in the context of other tasks. transitional practice is a kind of practice sequence that starts out with trials of large blocks; then moves to smaller random blocks, and eventually finishes with complete randomization. the aim of this study was to investigate the effect of ‘transit...