The Amount of Practice Really Matters

Abstract

Studies investigating the specificity hypothesis have not always demonstrated that reliance on a specific source of feedback increases with practice. The goal of the present study was to address this inconsistency by having participants practice a throwing task with or without vision at incremental levels (10, 50, 100, or 200 acquisition trials). Following acquisition, all participants in the present experiment performed 10 trials in a no-vision transfer condition. Our results demonstrated that, given a sufficient number of acquisition trials, feedback reliance increased as a function of time engaged in practice. Our results also suggest that increased reliance on a specific source of feedback occurs only after the control strategy for a task is optimized.