Motor Skills and Performance
This type of movement has a clearly specified beginning and end.
What is a discrete movement?
The crossing of nerve fibers to opposite sides of the nervous system.
What is decussation?
This type of long-term memory enables us to remember how to do something so that we can perform learned tasks.
What is procedural memory?
In this stage of information processing, we detect and recognize patterns.
What is stimulus identification?
The relearning of skills we can no longer perform due to injury.
What is motor learning?
An action that has a specific goal to achieve.
What is a skill?
These receptors inform the CNS about movement and position by detecting the stretch of the tissue in which they lie.
What are proprioceptors?
The ability to remember between 5 and 9 numbers for short periods of time.
What is the capacity of short-term memory?
The law that predicts the movement time required to hit a target given its size and distance.
What is Fitts’ law?
The number of independent elements to be controlled in a system.
What are degrees of freedom?
This system classifies skills based on environmental context and action function/goal.
What is Gentile’s Taxonomy?
The motor neuron and the muscle fibers it innervates.
What is a motor unit?
The failure to retrieve information from memory.
What is forgetting?
This law predicts a person’s choice reaction time from their simple reaction time and the number of choices.
What is Hick’s law?
In the final stage of this model, movements become automatic.
What is the Fitt’s and Posner model of motor learning?
This measure assesses consistency and is not relative to the target.
What is variable error?
These neurons increase the sensitivity of motor spindles to stretch.
What are gamma motor neurons?
If you learn a list of words after waking up, and are tested at the end of the day, this will disrupt your recall of the list of words.
What is retroactive interference?
The signature of this theory is invariant features, and compared to early motor program theory, it better addresses the memory capacity problem.
What is Schema theory?
This type of assessment of learning requires a period of no practice.
What is retention?
This performance measure describes motion without regard to what is causing that motion.
What is kinematics?
This ascending tract carries information about proprioception, vibration, and conscious refined touch.
What is the dorsal column tract?
This effect causes you to remember Venus and Neptune from the following list: Venus, Saturn, Sun, Jupiter, Neptune.
What is the serial order (or recency primacy) effect?
According to dynamical systems theory, this is the how the central nervous system groups together muscles and joints to work as one unit.
What is a coordinative structure?
When learning this type of skills, a learner will diversify their movements patterns in Stage 2 of Gentile’s two-stage model of motor learning.
What are open skills?