Factors affecting psychomotor skill

Amount of practice

It has been noted above (Figure 1) that the practice of sensorimotor tasks usually produces changes in scores that reflect diminishing returns. A major influence in learning generally, repetition is the most powerful experimental variable known in psychomotor-skills research. But practice alone does not make perfect; psychological feedback is also necessary. The consensus among theoreticians is that feedback must be relevant and reinforcing to effect permanent increments of habit strength.

The effects of feedback and four other important performance variables (i.e., task complexity, work distribution, motive-incentive conditions, and environmental factors) remain to be summarized.

Psychological feedback

Ranking prominently among experimental variables are so-called feedback contingencies (aftereffects, knowledge of results) that may be controlled by the experimenter so as to occur concurrently with or soon after a subject’s response. A learner appears to improve by knowing the discrepancy between a response he has made and the response required of him; but, in experimental practice, the investigator manipulates behaviour by transforming functions of error. Since transformations are usually numerical or spatial, sensory returns from one’s action may be informative, motivating, or reinforcing. Response-produced stimulation is intrinsic to most skeletal–muscular circuits; the neural consequences of bodily movement are fed back into the central nervous system to serve the organism’s regulatory and adaptive functions. When this normal feedback is interrupted or delayed, psychomotor skill is often seriously degraded. Experimentally delayed auditory feedback of a subject’s oral reading produces stuttering and other speech problems; delayed visual feedback in simulated automobile steering is a greater hazard under emergency conditions than is the driver’s reaction time.

Laboratory investigations have supported the following generalizations about psychomotor learning: (1) without some kind of relevant feedback, there is no acquisition of skill; (2) progressive gains in proficiency occur in the presence of relevant feedback; (3) performance is disrupted when relevant feedback is withdrawn; (4) delayed feedback in continuous (but not discrete) tasks is typically decremental; (5) augmented or supplementary feedback usually results in increments; (6) the higher the relative frequency of reinforcing feedback, the greater is the facilitation of skill; and (7) the more specific the feedback (e.g., in designating location, direction, amount), the better is the performance.

Experiments with a manual lever device, for example, suggest that when feedback is introduced and withdrawn at four stages of practice, the effect on error scores is profound. Knowledge of results given early and late has effects similar enough to reject any hypothesis that learning arises merely from repetition. These experiments indicate that practice makes perfect only if reinforced; the result of unreinforced practice is extinction of the correct response and a proliferation of errors. Studies employing a complex mirror-tracking apparatus have clarified the role of reinforcing feedback. Targeting performance was facilitated by presenting distinctive supplementary visual feedback cues previously associated with aversive (electrical shock) and nonaversive consequences. Moreover, the amount of facilitation grew curvilinearly with the number of cue conditioning trials. Work on human incentive learning thus demonstrates that the rate of gain in psychomotor proficiency can be regulated by stimuli that have been accompanied by positive or negative aftereffects. Persistence of the acquired reinforcing effects, considered with their cumulative quantitative properties, enhances the attractiveness of theoretical interpretations that emphasize continuity and reinforcement as contrasted with theories based on discontinuity and contiguity alone. Clark Hull’s system (1943) is the classic model.

Task complexity

The complexity of discrete psychomotor tasks may be specified either as the number of response sequences a subject can make or as some measure of a subject’s uncertainty about choices among stimuli. Still other factors that have been investigated as instances of complexity include variations in the number of possible responses at each choice point, different lengths of series, and regular versus unpredictable stimulus sequences.

Experimental procedures involving an increase of complexity produce more errors, require more trials to reach proficiency, and result in longer latencies per trial. Difficulty in psychomotor learning, therefore, generally increases with the complexity of the task to be mastered. An example of this phenomenon appears in Figure 2. Subjects exhibit continually altered probabilities of response during training sessions, and an average person with enough practice on a discrete sensorimotor task can learn to perceive, select, and react as fast to ten stimuli as he can to two. Apparently, it is not the number of choices among stimuli as much as it is the number of choices among responses that slows up a subject’s processing activities and complicates his decision problems. Indeed, by limiting response alternatives (e.g., circumscribing the physical range of a trainee’s movements or providing supplementary auditory and visual indicators of error), a training device can facilitate the acquisition or transfer of skill.

Work distribution

Some generalizations can be made about work and rest in psychomotor learning: (1) massed practice is usually superior to distributed practice for simple discrete-trial tasks; (2) distributed practice is usually superior for complex continuous-action tasks; (3) short practice sessions are generally superior to long practice sessions; (4) long rest periods are generally superior to short rest periods, although forgetting must be counteracted; (5) for continuous-tracking tasks practiced under constant work sessions and variable rest periods, the final proficiency level grows curvilinearly as the intertrial interval is lengthened; (6) gains in proficiency under distributed practice, or with interpolated rest periods during massed practice, usually reflect improvements in performance rather than in learning; (7) losses in proficiency under massed practice, or with increased work load, usually pertain to inhibitory rather than motivational decrements; (8) under certain conditions (such as “cramming” for examinations) it may be most efficient to mass practice as long as adequate rest can be obtained before criterion performance is demanded; (9) reminiscence increments and warm-up decrements are intimately related to schedules of work and rest; (10) decrement is not the same as fatigue.

Quite apart from the practical question of the optimal management of training programs (e.g., in coaching oarsmen in racing shells), the aversive inhibitory consequences of sustained action that are recognized as subjective fatigue and behavioral decrement are clearly adaptive. By a reflex negative-feedback mechanism, inhibitory impulses may prevent an organism from working itself to exhaustion. With few exceptions, the presumption in favour of spaced practice can safely be taken out of the psychomotor-skills laboratory and applied in the field. Research on the skills involved in, for example, archery, badminton, basketball, golf, dancing, juggling, marksmanship, rowing, and tennis supports the notion of distributing training by means of short workouts and frequent breaks.

Motive-incentive conditions

Motivational processes are states of the organism that serve to activate reaction tendencies. Such states are classified as primary (innate) or secondary (acquired, learned) motivation. Though common physiological needs (for food, water, or avoidance of pain) may evoke psychological drives (such as hunger, thirst, or pain), the concepts of need and drive are not perfectly correlated. Some needs (e.g., oxygen demand) seem to have no specific behavioral drive, and for some drives, clear-cut biological needs remain to be identified (e.g., curiosity). Despite this apparent discrepancy, there is a theoretical consensus that psychological drive arouses the body to action, energizes its latent responses, and supports its behaviour over time. Most theorists believe that motivation (drive) and learning (habit) interact to generate a response. This implies that the same level of psychomotor proficiency may arise from quite different combinations of learning and motivation. While these theoretical interpretations often apply well to laboratory animals, their application to human acquisition of skill is complicated because incentive learning is very abstract.

Physiological explanations of human behaviour that depend on the concept of primary motives (derived from research with rats or dogs) run into difficulties in view of the fact that primary motivation and reward do not appear to be critical in most studies of human skill acquisition. Thus, instead of giving food pellets (as to a rat), an experimenter delivers praise to a human subject; rather than receiving feedback by electric shock, the human can be guided by a needle moving on a dial or a buzzer signaling an error. Despite efforts to distinguish such motivational factors as general drives from selective incentives, attempts to demonstrate significant motivational effects in human psychomotor learning have met with only modest success. Among exceptions to the above are a few studies with standard apparatus (e.g., the complex coordinator) and with special devices that have indicated that incentives or disincentives such as money, verbal threats, electric shock, exhortations, and social competition may be relevant.

Environmental factors

Many practical skills must be executed outside the laboratory under unfavourable conditions of temperature, humidity, illumination, and motion. It is generally found that, below the limiting levels of extreme stress, such conditions affect psychomotor performance to a greater extent than they affect psychomotor learning. Representative findings have included the following: (1) isolation and sensory deprivation cause dramatic reductions in vigilance and monitoring skills within an hour; (2) environmental temperatures above or below 70 ± 5 °F (21 ± 3 °C) tend to lower scores on tracking apparatus but do not impair learning; (3) oxygen deficiency slows reaction time, especially when the atmosphere corresponds to altitudes of 20,000 feet or higher; (4) accelerations of the body in a centrifuge or rotating platform disrupt postural coordination and produce systematic shifts in the perception of the vertical; (5) although such people as acrobats, dancers, pilots, and skaters can adapt well to high accelerations, even they lose equilibrium if deprived of a visual frame of reference; (6) rather mild centrifugal effects of slow, constant rotation may induce acute motion sickness and associated degradation of psychomotor proficiency in normal persons; (7) while some controlled work-rest schedules of crews during confinement in a small cabin upset daily sleep rhythms and lead to decrements in watchkeeping, memory, and procedural skills, a schedule of four-hours-on versus four-hours-off duty can be maintained for several months without significant impairment; and (8) faulty identifications of visual displays on an eye-hand matching task have been produced in volunteer subjects exposed to controlled infectious diseases (e.g., respiratory tularemia, pappataci fever, viral encephalitis).

Other environmental stress variables found to exert negative influences are vibration, low illumination, high atmospheric pressure, noise, glare, toxic gases, ionization, and subgravity. Certain drugs have positive effects on psychomotor performance (e.g., amphetamines, magnesium pemoline, methyl caffeine, pipradrol); some have deleterious effects (e.g., alcohol, barbiturates, diphenhydramine hydrochloride, lysergic acid, meprobamate, phenothiazines, scopolamine, tetrahydrocannabinol, tripelennamine); and others are either neutral or have inconsistent effects (e.g., caffeine, nicotine).