Procedural skills such as riding a bicycle and playing a musical instrument play a central role in daily life. Such skills are learned gradually and are retained throughout life. The present study investigated 1-year retention of procedural skill in a version of the widely used serial reaction time task (SRTT) in young and older motor-skill experts and older controls in two experiments. The you...

Previous studies have demonstrated that varied practice (involving several versions of a skill) has advantage over constant practice (involving only one version of a skill) in learning a motor skill. However, the support for variable practice mainly came from studies using discrete motor skills. Therefore, the purpose of the study was to assess if variable practice was more effective than const...

Sleep-dependent memory consolidation is observed following motor skill learning: Performance improvements are greater over a 12-h period containing sleep relative to an equivalent interval without sleep. Here we examined whether older adults exhibit sleep-dependent consolidation on a sequence learning task. Participants were trained on one of two sequence learning tasks. Performance was assesse...

We describe the reduction from four to two dimensions of the SU(2) Donaldson-Witten theory and the dual twisted Seiberg-Witten theory, i.e. the Abelian topological field theory corresponding to the Seiberg–Witten monopole equations. NBI-HE-96-14 hep-th/9603023 ∗E-mail: [email protected]

The 150 Sm nucleus has been studied to high spins in a measurement of γ radiation following the 136 Xe(18 O,4n) 150 Sm, compound-nucleus reaction at beam energy of 76 MeV. The measurement was performed at NBI Risø using the NORDBALL array. Alternating parity, s=+1 band in 150 Sm has been observed up to spin I=22. This band is crossed by two aligned bands, corresponding to a reflection-symmetric...

We discuss the general structure of the non–abelian Born–Infeld action, together with all of the α derivative corrections, in flat D–dimensional space– time. More specifically, we show how the connection between open strings propagating in background magnetic fields and gauge theories on non–commutative spaces can be used to constrain the form of the effective action for the massless modes of o...

A review of the applications of noncommutative geometry to a systematic formulation of duality symmetries in string theory is presented. The spectral triples associated with a lattice vertex operator algebra and the corresponding Dirac-Ramond operators are constructed and shown to naturally incorporate target space and discrete worldsheet dualities as isometries of the noncommutative space. The...

Communication is a fundamental element of care at every level of nursing practice. It is important, therefore, for nurse managers to create environments that promote and encourage good communication, and help nurses to develop their communication skills formally and informally. This article discusses the effects of communication on the quality of care. It examines nurses' professional duty to m...

This article describes a neural network model of speech motor skill acquisition and speech production that explains a wide range of data on variability, motor equivalence, coarticulation, and rate effects. Model parameters are learned during a babbling phase. To explain how infants learn language-specific variability limits, speech sound targets take the form of convex regions, rather than poin...

Concurrent feedback provided during acquisition can enhance performance of novel tasks. The 'guidance hypothesis' predicts that feedback provision leads to dependence and poor performance in its absence. However, appropriately structured feedback information provided through sound ('sonification') may not be subject to this effect. We test this directly using a rhythmic bimanual shape-tracing t...