Skill in improvising enables emergency management personnel to make creative decisions under time constraint, even when risks are high. It therefore complements skill in plan-following, which is particularly appropriate when the current emergency is similar to a past one. This paper develops recommendations on how to use Information Technology (IT) in the design of training programmes for impro...

A major element in expert sports performance, particularly racket-and-ball games, is excellent anticipatory skill. A prestudy combined the temporal and spatial occlusion paradigms to ascertain which key stimuli badminton players use for anticipating the direction of overhead shots. The main study then evaluated a program for training anticipatory skills; 200 video clips were employed to orient ...

Practicing simple visual tasks induces substantial improvement. We investigated whether increased efficiency is accompanied by automaticity and immunity to across-task interference. We found that although practice speeds orientation feature detection, it does not abolish susceptibility to interference from introduction of concurrent central-letter identification, which takes priority. Yet follo...

Multimodal, immersive, virtual reality (VR) techniques open new perspectives for perceptual-motor skill trainers. They also introduce new risks and dangers. This paper describes the benefits and pitfalls of multimodal training and the cognitive building blocks of a multimodal, VR training simulators.

Common-sense folk psychology and mainstream philosophy of action agree about decisions: these are under an agent's direct control, and are thus intentional actions for which agents can be held responsible. I begin this paper by presenting a problem for this view. In short, since the content of the motivational attitudes that drive deliberation and decision remains open-ended until the moment of...

McFarland and Crouch (2002) reported substantial positive correlations (a) between the Implicit Association Test (IAT) and response speed and (b) between IATs assessing racism or self-esteem and ostensibly unrelated control IATs. Using an IAT measure in millisecond-difference score format, they concluded that the IAT was confounded with general cognitive ability. A reanalysis of these data usin...

In the early 1990s, a set of new techniques for manipulating mouse DNA allowed researchers to 'knock out' specific genes and observe the effects of removing them on a live mouse. In animal behaviour genetics, questions about how to deploy these techniques to study the molecular basis of behaviour became quite controversial, with a number of key methodological issues dissecting the interdiscipli...

The purpose of this study was to compare performance factors of youth soccer players according to position. A total of 101 high school soccer players were selected and were classified into goalkeeper (n=7), defense (n=37), midfield (n=39), and forward (n=18) positions. All subjects were subjected to the Wingate test for anaerobic capacity, shuttle run test for aerobic capacity, and pass, kick, ...

We introduce skill chaining, a skill discovery method for continuous domains. Skill chaining produces chains of skills leading to a salient event—where salience can be defined simply as an end-of-task reward, or as a more sophisticated heuristic (e.g., an intrinsically interesting event (Singh et al., 2004)). The goal of each skill in the chain is to reach a state where its successor skill can ...