Motor development - traditionally studied in WEIRD populations - falls victim to assumptions of universality similar to other domains described by Henrich et al. However, cross-cultural research illustrates the extraordinary diversity that is normal in motor skill acquisition. Indeed, motor development provides an important domain for evaluating cultural challenges to a general behavioral science.

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...

Growing evidence suggests that sleep plays an important role in the process of procedural learning. Most recently, sleep has been implicated in the continued development of motor-skill learning following initial acquisition. However, the temporal evolution of motor learning before and after sleep, the effects of different training regimens, and the long-term development of motor learning across...

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...

This report discusses the current research findings regarding veterinarian-client interactions and relationships and how they relate to equine veterinary practice. The application of the relationship-centered care model in equine medicine is described, and proven clinical communication skills that illustrate how to incorporate this model into equine veterinarian-client interactions are provided.

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 ...

Numerous types of age-related deficits in the nervous system have been well documented. While a distinction between general types of memories that are susceptible to compromise with advanced age has been fairly well agreed upon, it is often difficult to determine exactly which specific processes are detrimentally influenced. In this study, we used a paradigm that enabled us to distinguish betwe...

Because food and poultry industries are demanding an improvement in written communication skills among graduates, research paper writing should be an integral part of a senior undergraduate class. However, scientific writing assignments are often treated as secondary to developing the technical skills of the students. Scientific research paper writing has been emphasized in an undergraduate cou...

BACKGROUND This article describes the outcomes of a longitudinal, multilevel observational study in which the relationship between the processes of co-operation and giving explanations was compared between classes trained in communication skills and classes that were untrained. AIMS This study examined the effects of training in basic communication skills on the processes of co-operation and ...