The purpose of this study was to find out in different activities interpolated during the post-KR delay interval influence motor learning. In accordance with this purpose, the experimental groups was divided into 4;i.e., rest, mental practice, verbal ...
The purpose of this study was to find out in different activities interpolated during the post-KR delay interval influence motor learning. In accordance with this purpose, the experimental groups was divided into 4;i.e., rest, mental practice, verbal interpolated activity, and motor interpolated activity groups. Accroding to previous studies, mental practice has been shown to have a relatively positive effect on learning. However, learning effects as a function of different interpolated activities(verbal or motor) have been found to be inconsistent with each other, possibly due to the procedual problems inherent in different investigations. When human is viewed as an information processor, interpolated tasks require extra information processing and thus it is assumed that the sped of forming the next response is degraded because of capacity limitation(of structural or capacity type) of information processor.
Therefore, hypotheses were drawn as follows: 2) differences exist among rest, mental practice, verbal interpolated activity, and motor interpolated activity groups, 2) a verbal interpolated activity is expected to create a greater decrement in early performance and learning as compared with motor interpolated activity due to capacity or structural interference.
To test the above hypotheses, 40 students from Sung San girls' middle school were randomly assigned into 4 groups of 10. Subjects in each groupwere given 30 trials of pursuit rotor performance, with a trial lasting for 30 seconds. Four different experimental groups were required to do different activities during the post-KR delay interval, i.e., 1) rest, 2) mental practice, 3) verval interpolated activity, 4) motor interpolated activity. Time on target(TOT) in the performance of pursuit rotor was recorded for each subject as a function of trials. Mean TOTs were calculated and then were subjected to the analysis of variance (ANOVA) with repeated-measure. Two-way ANOVA along with Newman-Keuls' post hoc analysis revealed the following results:
1) In the learning of motor skill, 4 different groups have learned criterion task a different rate; the mental practice group showed most positive effect on learning than the other groups (the following is the rest group, and then verbal/motor activities).
2) The verbal interpolated activity group and the motor interpolated activity group performed with no difference.
These results were interpreted to suggest that: 1) different kinds ok interpolated activities during the post-KR delay interval produced differing degree of learning, 2) mental practies is most effective for the erformance of the next motor response in comparison with the other interpolated activities investigated in the present study.