The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of guided play and free play in an enriched environment intervention programs using motor skill development in kindergarten children. Seventy-one children attending kindergarten classes were assigned to two experimental groups and one control group. Participants performed the Test of Gross Motor Development-2 before and after the interven...

Caffeine is widely consumed throughout the world and appears to indirectly facilitate learning and memory through effects on attention and motivation. Animal work indicates that post-training caffeine administration augments inhibitory avoidance memory, spatial memory, and object memory. In humans, post-training caffeine administration enhances the ability to discern between familiar images and...

Since its development 20 years ago, the serial reaction time task (SRTT) has gone from being a tool used by psychologists (Nissen and Bullemer, 1987) to one that, in the last few years, has been embraced by a wider community (Fig. 1). Embedded within this task is a sequence, a connected series of events, that engages processes supporting the temporal organization of behavior, the formation of h...

Reward has been shown to change behavior as a result of incentive learning (by motivating the individual to increase their effort) and instrumental learning (by increasing the frequency of a particular behavior). However, Palminteri et al. (2011) demonstrated that reward can also improve the incidental learning of a motor skill even when participants are unaware of the relationship between the ...

OBJECTIVE To investigate associations between motor skills, exercise capacity and cognitive functions, and evaluate how they correlate to academic performance in mathematics and reading comprehension using standardised, objective tests. METHODS This cross-sectional study included 423 Danish children (age: 9.29±0.35 years, 209 girls). Fine and gross motor skills were evaluated in a visuomotor ...

Sleep benefits memory across a range of tasks for young adults. However, remarkably little is known of the role of sleep on memory for healthy older adults. We used 2 tasks, 1 assaying motor skill learning and the other assaying nonmotor/declarative learning, to examine off-line changes in performance in young (20-34 years), middle-aged (35-50 years), and older (51-70 years) adults without diso...

Stringed instrument bowing is a complex coordinative motor skill acquired though years of intense practice. We apply a novel "freezing" analysis to investigate how movement at different joints contributes to bow transport (movement amplitude), stabilization of bow parameters (angle, velocity) during bow movements, and quick reversals of bow direction (acceleration amplitude). Participants were ...

Implicit motives like the need for power (nPower) scale affective responses to need-specific rewards or punishments and thereby influence activity in motivational-brain structures. In this paper, we review evidence specifically supporting a role of the striatum in nPower. Individual differences in nPower predict (1) enhanced implicit learning accuracy, but not speed, on serial-response tasks th...

This paper presents an experiment to determine the underlying learning mechanism by which shared control with error reduction improves training effectiveness for dynamic manual control tasks in virtual environments. Specifically, the authors test the hypothesis that the learning mechanism of shared control with error reduction is through demonstration of the preferred strategy in the early phas...

The relationship between the brain and the environment is flexible, forming the foundation for our ability to learn. Here we review the current state of our understanding of the modifications in the sensorimotor pathway related to sensorimotor learning. We divide the process into three hierarchical levels with distinct goals: (1) sensory perceptual learning, (2) sensorimotor associative learnin...