Immediate vs. postponed visual feedback in practising a handwriting task

Abstract

Two experiments are reported in which adult subjects practised the writing of four graphemes chosen from the Arabic alphabet. In both experiments the type of visual feedback was varied. In order to study the effects of feedback variation on the dynamics of the acquisition process, the absolute and relative changes of movement time and writing dysfluency across the first three segments of the graphemes were analyzed. The overall results of both experiments showed that movement time and writing dysfluency decreased, but that this decrease was significantly less for the first segment than it was for the second and the third segment. This finding corroborated the earlier exposed view (Portier et al. 1990) that the effects of practice may be described as a shift of programming strategies. The authors argued that advance serial element-to-element preparation prior to movement initiation gradually develops towards on-line retrieval of oncoming writing segments during real-time execution of the initial segments of a grapheme. At the acquisition level, the present data provide evidence that practising a handwriting task with immediate feedback induces most explicitly an on-line programming strategy, which can be identified from the differential effects on movement time and writing dysfluency. At the performance level, however, both experiments disclosed significant disadvantages of immediate