Learning to organize the frequency components of a perceptual motor skill

Abstract

The question ‘ What is learned?’ has been of concern to researchers in Psychology and Motor Learning for several decades. The present study was designed to investigate this question in reference to the perceptual motor task of pursuit tracking. The hypothesis being tested was whether the organization of a movement in terms of its component frequencies is one of the aspects of the movement that is learned. Two experiments were carried out in which subjects were given extensive tracking practice on a particular waveform and subsequently transferred to waveforms containing identical component frequencies to the original but having entirely different topologies. Results from the first experiment did not show the systematic acquisition of component frequencies found in previous studies (Franks and Wilberg 1982; Marteniuk and Romanow 1983) and indicate that this systematic acquisition may be task specific. Results from the second experiment suggest that movement is not learned in terms of its component frequencies when these component frequencies are dissociated from their phase angles.