Wednesday 19 October 2011

Perception & Action Lab: Perceptual Learning Immediately Yields New Stable Motor Coordination

Perception & Action Lab: Perceptual Learning Immediately Yields New Stable Motor Coordination



The purpose of this study is to determine whether perceptual training can significantly improve an unstable movement, which in this case is 90º.


12 participants (22-54 years old), half of which were assigned to an experimental group and the other to a controlled group. The experimental group participated in training sessions as well as assessment sessions, receiving feedback at the training sessions. The controlled group did three sessions of movement trials, with no feedback or training given. Experimental group took part in up to 14 training sessions (depending on how quickly plateau state of improvement occurred) and three assessment sessions. Each training set became increasingly harder; participants had a maximum of four repetitions to successfully complete each set otherwise they’d progress automatically to promote forced learning. Training did not involve any extensive practise regarding the movement task itself so learning is solely perception based.


Judgement data was analysed first to see whether the experimental group learnt as a result of the extensive training; which was followed by analysis of the movement data. A repeated measures ANOVA test was conducted to find out whether there were significant results regarding the two groups. Significant results were found in the experimental group, showing a significant improvement during training as well as improvements in movement assessment, which indicates a high correlation between the two. The repeated measures ANOVA test showed no significant results in the movement task (without perceptual training) concerning the controlled group.


This study concludes that participants improved their movement stability at 90 º due to improvements in perceptual training at 90 º.

1 comment:

  1. This is a good summary, but you need to be much more careful with your grammar; you're saying things that aren't quite right because you're not phrasing things carefully enough.

    For instance;
    This study concludes that participants improved their movement stability at 90 º due to improvements in perceptual training at 90 º.
    The section in bold makes no sense; there was no "improvement in perceptual training", there was perceptual learning because of the perceptual training.

    otherwise they’d progress automatically to promote forced learning.
    Not quite; we moved them to the harder condition to promote learning, or to force learning, but not to promote forced learning (which isn't a thing).

    Significant results were found in the experimental group
    This doesn't mean anything. You need to be more specific here; something like 'Performance in the perceptual judgement condition improved significantly with learning'.

    These are all just little things, but the net result is that you will actually say what you're trying to say :) I'd recommend redrafting this and posting that edit; take each point one at a time: eg
    Significant results were found in the experimental group, showing a significant improvement during training as well as improvements in movement assessment, which indicates a high correlation between the two.
    There's about 4 things going in in here. Talk about exactly what happened to the experimental group's perceptual performance, then the action performance - split this out into more than one sentence.

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