BACKGROUND Surgical tasks are performed in a sequence of steps, and technical skill evaluation includes assessing task flow efficiency. Our objective was to describe differences in task flow for expert and novice surgeons for a basic surgical task. METHODS We used a hierarchical semantic vocabulary to decompose and annotate maneuvers and gestures for 135 instances of a surgeon's knot performe...

Echocardiography is an essential tool in managing patients with mitral regurgitation. It allows identification and precise summation of anatomic lesions that lead to valve dysfunction. In this article, we highlight important aspects of mitral valve anatomy and pathophysiology as they pertain to surgical repair and discuss the critical role of echocardiography in surgical planning and assessment...

We examined the controlling factors that allow a prompted skill to become autonomous in a discrete-trials implementation of Touchette's (1971) progressively delayed prompting procedure, but our subjects were rats rather than children with disabilities. Our prompted skill was a left-right lever-press sequence guided by two panel lights. We manipulated (a) the effectiveness of the guiding lights ...

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...