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 ...

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...

There have been striking postwar changes in the supply and price of skilled labor relative to unskilled labor. The relative quantity of skilled labor has increased substantially, and the skill premium, which is the wage of skilled labor relative to unskilled labor, has grown signiicantly since 1980. Many studies have found that it is diicult to account for the increase in the skill premium on t...

This paper investigates international migrations patterns by skill and by region across the European Union during the period 1988-2005, which is characterised by substantial economic integration and further geographic enlargement. After presenting some facts about the regional distribution of skills of natives and foreigners, and their evolution over time, we develop a theoretical model where t...

Many new skills are acquired during early childhood. Typical laboratory skill learning tasks are not applicable for developmental studies that involve children younger than 8 years of age. It is not clear whether young children and adults share a basic underlying skill learning mechanism. In the present study, the learning and retention of a simple grapho-motor pattern were studied in three age...

INTRODUCTION The study of expertise tends to focus on humans who can perform extraordinary feats. Although the way in which expertise is acquired is often characterized as similar to everyday skill acquisition, the attainment of basic numeracy skills is rarely considered in the same context as the attainment of expertise. It is clear, though, that average numeracy skills possess all the hallmar...

Athletes devote their lives to practicing their chosen sport so as to attain the highest level of skilled performance. A perennial question is why are some athletes better than others? Most debates on this issue reduce to genetics (natural abilities) vs differences in accumulated deliberative practice. In contrast, the target article under discussion here reports on a study that identified psyc...

OBJECTIVE Box model trainers have been used for many years to facilitate the improvement of laparoscopic skills. However, there are limited data available on box trainers and their impact on skill acquisition, assessed by virtual reality systems. MATERIAL AND METHODS Twenty-two Postgraduate Year 1 gynecology residents with no laparoscopic experience were randomly divided into one group that r...

I provide an economic model with endogenous movements in TFP as a tool for understanding a rationale behind the productivity decline in New Zealand. Cohort quality, measured by a country's human capital distribution determines opportunities for growth. Vintages of human skills are subject to network effects. These network effects, while important for productivity, have the side effect of introd...

This study examines cognitive and non-cognitive skills and their transmission from parents to children as one potential candidate to explain the intergenerational link of socio-economic status. Using representative data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study, we contrast the impact of parental cognitive abilities (fluid intelligence, crystallized intelligence) and personality traits (Big Fi...