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Psychology 428 Human Motor Control and Learning
Beth Kerr
Psych 428 tackles questions about the ways people learn, perfect, and perform motor skills. The emphasis is on experiments in which normal adults perform real-world tasks such as driving a car, playing the piano, or catching a ball, as well as laboratory experiments.Students should leave this course with a better understanding of:
1. Human motor control and learning – viewed from the behavioral perspective. Topics include:
- ways that practice conditions and the frequency and format for knowledge of results and feedback influence both skill acquisition and retention
- explicit versus implicit memory and learning for motor skills
- the role of attentional focus, in particular internal versus external focus
- proprioception, vision, and visual dominance
- spatial frames of reference
- experts and domain specific knowledge
- the consequences too much “help” during skill acquisition, negative imagery, over-thinking, and explicit learning and choking
- sequence learning
- coordination
- the role of reflexes in motor control
- feedforward, fine tuning, and correction
- posture and voluntary movements
2. The research designs and methods employed to address problems in three different but related areas: 1) the factors that influence skill acquisition and retention, 2) the role of perception and cognitive factors in motor control and learning, and 3) motor production and the central and sensory components of motor control.
Students will also have opportunities to practice and improve scientific writing skills. Class members will write short descriptions of the results for mini-experiments conducted as part of the course. In addition, they will write, with revision, a short literature review paper.
Some students may be able to apply the motor control and learning principles they learn to their own sport, music, or dance performance or to instructional setting such as teaching, coaching and physical and occupational therapy.
