Reminiscence as a factor in the learning of skilled movements

Abstract

Skill in movement has to be acquired, and to acquire such skills is a lengthy and complicated business. A baby has to spend many months in order to learn to toddle, and finally to walk, and sportsmen spend years of arduous training, often many hours a day, in order to perfect their ability to hit or kick a ball accurately, perform the correct movements in jumping or throwing, and in the development of other movement skills. Psychologists can look upon such developments of skilled movements, and the individual differences inevitably shown therein, from either a macroscopic or a microscopic point of view1; in other words, we may look at the actual training that occurs in the development of sporting abilities, under everyday life conditions (macroscopic), or we may study in the laboratory certain theories concerning the development of movement skills (microscopic). A review of work in the macroscopic field, particularly as far as it is concerned with individual differences, is given in the monograph on Sport and Personality by Eysenck, Nias and Cox1. Here we will be concerned with a particular microscopic phenomenon which is fundamental to an understanding of the problem in question.