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...

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...

Aim To investigate the possibility of assessing clinical skill competence of nursing students by using the Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE). Methods The search for empirical articles on the assessment of clinical skill competence of nursing students was based on the SCOPUS electronic database. Search strategy included the utilization of two or three key words based on the MeSH i...

Human error is a significant and ever-growing problem in the healthcare sector. In this study, resource allocation problem is considered along with human errors to optimize utilization of resources in an emergency department. The algorithm is composed of simulation, artificial neural network (ANN), design of experiment (DOE) and fuzzy data envelopment analysis (FDEA). It is a multi-response opt...

Policies to Create and Destroy Human Capital in Europe Trends in skill bias and greater turbulence in modern labor markets put wages and employment prospects of unskilled workers under pressure. Weak incentives to utilize and maintain skills over the life-cycle become manifest with the ageing of the population. Reinvention of human capital policies is required to avoid increasing welfare state ...