Stages of Skill Acquisition

- Typical patterns of motor skill development occur, maturation, adaptions to changing constraints (the base is the prenatal period which is the last 2 trimesters of pregnancy- movement in the womb) - Reflexive period -Preadapted period - Fundamental motor patterns - Context- specific motor skills - Skillfulness period - Compensation period

- Following birth, lasts 2 weeks - Sensory changes: palmar grasping reflex, sucking reflex, crawling reflex, etc.

- 2 weeks to 1 month - Interact with the environment, goal directed activities, rolls over

- 1 to 7 years - Running, jumping with both feet, galloping, hopping, then skipping - Can perform the two fundamental skills necessary for basic survival: walk independently and self-feed

- 7 to 11 - Refining of fundamental motor patterns

- 11 and older - Skilled movement - Peak of the mountain

- Injury, adaptation due to aging (permanent changes due to these injuries cause people to be at a lower spot on the mountain)

- 4 levels children pass through, and movement characteristics, as they learn motor skills: - Precontrol: awkward, clumsy, low success, by chance - Control: full concentration, replicate, awkward - Utilization: smoother & automatic, attention moves away from the task at hand to other performance cues - Proficiency: automatic & confident, makes adjustments, search environment for cue

- Paul Fitts and Michael Posner's Classic Learning Stages Model (1967) - Three-Stage Model, referred to in text and research today - Cognitive: beginning/novice - Associative: intermediate or practice - Autonomous: advanced or fine-tuning

- Change in the rate of improvement is faster during the cognitive stage - Greater room for improvement, learning of the fundamental skills

- Focuses on gaining an understanding of how the skill is to be performed - Solves cognitively-orientated problems, try to answer questions, what, how, where - Characterized by verbal activity by the athlete/patient (talk themselves through the movement)

Athlete develops a motor program for the skill, internal program that contains a set of instructions to guide the movement

- Large, gross, # of errors - Performance of fundamental movement patterns, a lot of questions - Attention to every detail of activity - Unable to screen out irrelevant information - Inconsistent performance - Slow, jerky, uncoordinated

- Increase corrective feedback - Use short verbal cues - Use demonstrations, modeling, videotape, etc. - Lots of opportunities to explore skill - Numerous repetition - Simple to complex

- Focus is on skill refinement,consistency, eliminate extraneous movements, and make fewer, less gross errors - Learns to associate environmental cues with movements for goal achievement - Visual learning is replaced by proprioceptive control - Proprioceptors: Golgi tendon organs, provides muscle tension information and muscle spindles, length of muscle - Visual search strategies to monitor external environment are developed - This stage lasts longer than the cognitive stage, and not all learners will transition to the final stage of learning

- Fewer errors - Motor program continues to develop - Performer discovers environmental regularities - Anticipation develops - Learns to monitor own feedback

- Distribute corrective feedback on movement patterns/proprioceptive - Stress correct fundamentals - Accommodate differences in the rate of skill development - Design appropriate and effective practice sessions

- Emerges when the learner can perform the skill at a maximal level of proficiency - Requires little conscious thought - Skill has become almost automatic/habitual - Can perform more than one task - Can detect own errors & make proper adjustments

- Motor program become units of action - Decreased attention demands - Confidence increases, self-talks shifts to strategy - Performance gains are slower

- Focus on strategy - Work on mental focus - Develop learner diagnosis of skill - Small changes can be made, major changes in technique puts the athlete back into cognitive stage - Encourage, motivate, support

- 3 contributing factors: - Quality of instruction - Quality of practice - Amount of practice - Fitts & Posner based learning on a continuum - Gradual transition or change from stage to stage

- Degrees of Freedom Problem: number of functional units required to solve a movement problem - Ex: Tennis forehand: cordination of wrist, elbow, and shoulder joints and muscles = degrees of freedom - Relates to Gentile's initial stage of learning: acquire movement coordination pattern to achieve action goal

- Stage 1: freezing the limbs: Novice strategy, simplify - Stage 2: Releasing the limbs - Stage 3: Exploiting the environment, gravity, or inertia

- Freezing the Degrees of Freedom: holding some joints rigid/firm/stiff - Ex: Child throwing a ball, arm only (elbow joint), no trunk or leg action - Clinicians: rehabilitation exercises in only one plane of motion, fewer joints, or both

- Practicing skill results in releasing the constraints - Practice: freeing of the degrees of freedom - Degrees of freedom become coordinative structures (functional units of action), limit potential options (muscles and joints) for particular movement pattern, texting - Teaching practitioner, encourage learner to increase range of motion

- Frozen to fluid, referred to as "Functional Synergy" - Functional Synergy: Body parts working together in a multisegment unit, enables optimal performance, maximizing muscular efficiency - Result: Southard and Higgins (1987) reported an increase in racquetball forehand velocity at ball impact - Also called "exploiting the environment"

- Stage 1: getting the idea of the movement - Learner gains an understanding of the basic coordination pattern that must be organized to accomplish the motor skill - Learner distinguishes the regulatory (conditions that provide relevant information for a motor skill) and non regulatory conditions (distract the learner or prevent them from accomplishing the goal) for the motor skill - Stage 2: fixation and diversification - Fixation: closed skills, goal is consistency - Diversification: open skills, goal is adaptable to changing environment

- Beginner develops movement characteristics that match regulatory conditions - Catching regulatory conditions: size, shape, speed, spin - Rehabilitation: reaching/grasping object

- Discriminate between regulatory conditions and non-regulatory conditions  - To achieve goals performer explores a variety of movement possibilities, successful and unsuccessful - Attend to relevant cues, RC, ignore irrelevant cues, NRC - Solve problems: must engage in cognitive problem-solving activities - End of first stage: developed a movement coordination pattern, allows some action goal achievement - End of stage: lacks consistency and efficiency

- Learner needs to acquire three general characteristics: - Adapting: Movement pattern to specific demands of performance situation - Consistency: Increase to achieve goal - Performance: Requires "economy of effort

- Gentile's second stage: learners goals depend on type of skill, closed or open - Closed skills require fixation of movement pattern (refine movement pattern "initial stage" to develop optimal movement pattern to allow consistent and automatic action goal achievement) - Open skills require diversification of movement pattern (adapt quickly to changing spatial and temporal regulatory conditions, modify movements according to the environmental context characteristics)

- Practice opportunities: - Fixation/Closed skills: allow learner to plan and prepare, self-paced, limited or without time restraints = consistency - Diversification/Open skills: limit the amount of time to plan and prepare, anticipate changes, externally paced, adapatable