| Term | Definition |
|---|
| attention | in human performance, characteristics associated with consciousness, awareness, and cognitive effort as they relate to the performance of skills with particular reference to the limitations associated with these characteristics on the simultaneous performance of multiple sills and the detection of relevant information in the peformance environmnt |
| central resource theories of attention | attention capacity theories that propose one central source of attention resources for which all activities requiring attention compete |
| arousal | the general state of excitability of a person, involving physiological, emotional, and mental systems |
| multiple resource theories | theories of attention proposing that there are sveral attention resource mechanisms, each of which is related to a specific information procesing activity and is limited in how much information it can process simultaneously |
| dual task procedure | an experimental procedure used in the study of attention to determine the amount of attention required to perform an action, or a part of an action; the procedure involves assessing the degree of interference caused by one task when a person is simultaeously performing another task |
| attentional focus | the directing of attention to specific characteristics in a performance environment, or to action-preparation activities |
| automaticity | the term used to indicate that a person performs a skill, or engages in certain information processing activities, without requiring attention resources |
| selecive attention | refers, in the study of attention as it relates to human learning and erformance, to the detection and selection of performance related information in the performance environment |
| visual search | the process of directing visual attention to locate relevant information in the environment that will enable a person to determine how to prepare and perform a skill in a specific situation |
| working memory | a functional system in the structure of memory that operates to temporarily store and use recently presented information |
| long term memory | a component system in the structure of memory that serves as a relatively permanent storage repository for information |
| declaritive knowledge | knowledge about "what to do" in a situation; this knowledge typically is verbalizable |
| procedural knowledge | knowledge that enables a person to know "how to do" a skill; not verbalizable |
| encoding | a memory process involving the transformation of information to be remembered into a form that can be stored in memory |
| retrieval | a memory process involving the search through long term memory for information needed to perform the task at hand |
| recall test | an explicit memory test that requires a person to produce a required response with few, if any, availiable cues or aids |
| recognition test | an explicit memory test that requires a person to select a correct response from several alternative responses |
| proactive interference | a cause of forgetting because of activity that occurs prior to the presentation of information to be remembered |
| retroactive interference | a cause of forgetting because of activity during the retention interval |
| performance | the behavioral act of executing a skill at a specific time and in a specific situation |
| learning | change in the capability of a person to perform a skill; it must be inferred from a relatively permanent improvement in performance as a result of practice or experience |
| stability | the influence on skill performance of pertubations, which are internal or external conditions that can disrupt performance |
| performance curve | line graph describing performance in which the level of achievement of a performance measure is plotted for a specific sequence of time or trials; the units of the performance measure are on the Y axis and the time unit or trials are on the X axis |
| retention test | test of practiced skill that a learner performs following an interval of time after practice has ceased |
| transfer test | test in which a person performs a skill that is different from the skill he or she practiced or performs the practiced skill in a context or situation different from the practice context or situation |
| performance plateau | while learning a skill, a period of time in which the learner experiences no improvement after having experienced consistent improvement; typically the learner then experiences further improvement with continued practice |
| cognitive stage | the first stage of learning in the Fitts and Posner model; the beginning or initial stage on the learning stages continuum |
| associateve stage | the second stage of learning in the Fitts and Posner model; an intermediate stage on the learning stage continuum |
| autonomous stage | the third stage of learning in the Fitts and Posner model; the final stage on the learning stages continuum |
| nonregulatory conditions | characteristics of the performance environment that do not influence the movement characteristics required to achieve an action goal |
| fixation | the learner's goal in the second stage of learning in Gentiles model for learning closed skills in which learners refine movement patterns so that they can produce them correctly, consistency, efficiently from trial to trial |
| diversification | the learner's goal in the second stage of learing in Gentiles model for learning open skills in which learners acquire the capability to modify the movement pattern according to environmental context characteristics |
| power law of practice | mathematical law describing the negatively accelerating change in rate of performance improvement during skill learning; large amounts of improvement occur during early practice, but smaller improvement rates characterize further practice |
| freezing the degrees of freedom | common initial strategy of beginning learners to control the many degrees of freedom associated with the coordination demands of a motor skill in order to achieve the action goal; the person holds some joints rigid while performing the skill |
| superdiagonal form | a term describing the way the trail to trial correlations appear in a correlation matrix where all trials are correlated with each other; trials that are closer to each other have scores more highly correlated; the correlation decreases as trials become farther apart |
| identical elements theory | an explanation of positive transfer proposing that transfer is due to the degree of similarity between the component parts or characteristics of two skills or two performance contexts |
| transfer appropriate processing theory | an explanation of positive transfer proposing that transfer is due to the similarity in the cognitive processing characteristics required by the two skills or two performance situations |
| bilateral transfer | transfer of learning that occurs between two limbs |
| asymmetric transfer | bilateral transfer in which there is a greater amount of transfer from one limb than from the other limb |
| symmetric transfer | bilateral transfer in which the amount of transfer is similar from one limb to another, no matter which limb is used first |
Combine with other sets
Share on Facebook
Share on MySpace