Reaching is an important and early emerging motor skill that allows infants to interact with the physical and social world. However, few studies have considered how reaching experiences shape infants' own motor development and their perception of actions performed by others. In the current study, two groups of infants received daily parent guided play sessions over a 2-weeks training period. Us...

Allowing learners to control some aspect of instructional support (e.g., augmented feedback) appears to facilitate motor skill acquisition. No studies, however, have examined self-controlled (SC) video feedback without the provision of additional attentional cueing. The purpose of this study was to extend previous SC research using video feedback about movement form for the basketball set shot ...

We describe an uncontrolled manifold hypothesis, which suggests a particular solution for the notorious problem of motor redundancy. A body of recent experiments supports the uncontrolled manifold hypothesis and shows its ability to discover biological strategies of the coordination of apparently redundant motor systems. The hypothesis and associated computational apparatus have great potential...

The importance of non-technical skills to surgical performance is gaining wide acceptance. This article discusses the core cognitive and social skills categories thought to underpin medical knowledge and surgical expertise, and describes the rise of non-technical skill models of assessment in surgery. Behavior rating systems such as NOTSS (Non-Technical Skills for Surgeons) have been developed ...

Why are performance trade-offs so rarely detected in animals when their underlying physiological basis seems so intuitive? One possibility is that individual variation in health, fitness, nutrition, development or genetics, or 'individual quality', makes some individuals better or worse performers across all motor tasks. If this is the case, then correcting for individual quality should reveal ...

OBJECTIVE to analyze the development and mobilization of relational skills central to the caring process among nursing students throughout their professional training. METHOD this was a quantitative study, descriptive and cross-sectional in design. The sample consisted of nursing undergraduate students from the Higher School of Health Sciences, in the city of Évora, Portugal. Data were collec...

Adults in authority (teachers, employers, police officers, doctors, benefits officers, etc.) have been found to view adolescents as lacking in communication skills and even the motivation to communicate with them. Adolescents themselves, on the other hand, highlight issues of power and a lack of respect in causing problems in their communication with these adults. This review suggests that mutu...

Transfer (i.e., the application of a learned skill in a novel context) is an important and desirable outcome of motor skill learning. While much research has been devoted to understanding transfer of explicit skills the mechanisms of skill transfer after incidental learning remain poorly understood. The aim of this study was to (1) examine the effect of practice schedule on transfer and (2) inv...

Dealing with difficult patients can represent a significant burden in the life of doctors. It is more productive, however, to view this burden as a product of the interaction between doctor and patient, for which both have a responsibility, rather than attributing any problems encountered to shortcomings of the patient alone. There is a significant risk in such situations of potentially harmful...

We recently defined a component of motor skill learning as "motor acuity," quantified as a shift in the speed-accuracy trade-off function for a task. These shifts are primarily driven by reductions in movement variability. To determine the neural correlates of improvement in motor acuity, we devised a motor task compatible with magnetic resonance brain imaging that required subjects to make fin...