A novel upper limb motor skill measure, task productivity rate (TPR) was developed integrating speed and spatial error, delivered by a practical motor skill rehabilitation task (MSRT). This prototype task involved placement of 5 short pegs horizontally on a spatially configured rail array. The stability of TPR was tested on 18 healthy right-handed adults (10 women, 8 men, median age 29 years) i...

Motor learning is a ubiquitous feature of human competence. This review focuses on two particular classes of model tasks for studying skill acquisition. The serial reaction time (SRT) task is used to probe how people learn sequences of actions, while adaptation in the context of visuomotor or force field perturbations serves to illustrate how preexisting movements are recalibrated in novel envi...

Experts in a skill produce movement-related cortical potentials (MRCPs) of smaller amplitude and later onset than novices. This may indicate that, following long-term training, experts require less effort to plan motor skill performance. However, no longitudinal evidence exists to support this claim. To address this, EEG was used to study the effect of motor skill training on cortical activity ...

BACKGROUND Motor skill learning usually comprises "fast" improvement in performance within the initial training session and "slow" improvement that develops across sessions. Previous studies have revealed changes in activity and connectivity in motor cortex and striatum during motor skill learning. However, the nature and dynamics of the plastic changes in each of these brain structures during ...

Purpose: Developmental coordination disorder (DCD) is common among intellectual disability children that can worsen motor problems, especially motor skills. The purpose of the study was to examine the effect of combining core stability exercises with coordination exercises on Motor Proficiency of the intellectual disability children with DCD. Methods: The population was intellectual disability...

Action observation training and motor imagery training have independently been studied and considered as an effective training strategy for improving motor skill learning. However, comparative studies of the two training strategies are relatively few. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of action observation training and motor imagery training on the development of mental r...

Childhood hearing impairment is a common chronic condition that may have a major impact on acquisition of speech, social and physical development. Numerous literature states that injury to the vestibular organs may result in accompanying balance and motor development disorders. But still postural control and motor assessments are not a routine procedure in hearing impaired children. Hence, we a...

OBJECTIVE The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of haptic attributes of objects on infants' grasping patterns and evaluate whether this effect is influenced by the infant's age (i.e., phase of motor development). METHOD Grasping patterns of 180 infants who were typically developing were measured by the Posture and Fine Motor Assessment of Infants (PFMAI); the PFMAI-I was adm...

Observation aids motor skill learning. When multiple models or different levels of performance are observed, does learning improve when the observer is informed of the performance quality prior to each observation trial or after each trial? We used a knock-down barrier task and asked participants to learn a new relative timing pattern that differed from that naturally emerging from the task con...