Reading focus
Syllabus: How Does Experience Change Behavior?
Reconstruct the practice and test schedules before interpreting the results, and distinguish retention of practiced patterns from transfer to related ones.
Why you’re reading it. Apply the review’s distinction to a bounded motor-learning experiment.
A question to consider. One group practices each workshop procedure in a block and another alternates among them. How would you assess learning without favoring either group through the test order?
Why this reading
This experiment makes the timing and conditions of assessment consequential. Practicing several movement patterns in blocks or in a mixed order can produce different conclusions during training and on subsequent tests.
Before you read
Blocked practice repeats one task before moving to another; random practice mixes tasks. Contextual interference here concerns interference among tasks during practice. Reaction time measures preparation before movement; movement time measures execution; total time combines them.
Read for
- Reconstruct the three practiced motor tasks, the two practice schedules, and the later retention and transfer tests.
- Compare the acquisition curves with Table 1 and Figure 2, attending to the order used during the retention test as well as the delay.
- Use Table 2 to ask how similar the transfer tasks are to those practiced, and what that permits the authors to infer.
Consider afterwards
- A training programme produces quicker performance during practice. Which features of this experiment would you borrow before concluding that its trainees learned more?
Editorial context
The study used 72 college students performing constrained motor sequences. Participants were matched using pretest performance; do not assume a randomized allocation procedure that the paper does not report. The transfer tests concern related movement tasks, not unrestricted transfer to everyday expertise. The later Soderstrom and Bjork review supplies a broader setting for evaluating this example.