Chapter 9
Skill Acquisition, Retention, Transfer
Objectives
• This chapter will help you to
understand the following:
– Principles of the skill acquisition process
– Two conceptualizations of learning stages
during skill acquisition
– Factors that influence the retention of
skills after periods of no practice
– Factors that influence the transfer of skills
to new tasks or performance situations
Specificity of Practice
• In general, specificity of learning suggests
that what you learn depends largely on what
you practice.
– On average do teams perform better at home or
away games?
• Practicing in a particular environment or workspace
often leads to better performance mainly in that
workspace.
– On average the West coast receives more rain
than the East coast. Should athletes on the
West coast practice inside or outside when its
raining?
• The sensory feedback resulting from performance
during specific types of practice becomes part of the
learned representation for skill.
Contextual Interference Effect
(CIE)
Contextual interference is the interference that results
from practicing various skills within the same context of
practice
• High contextual interference results in
better learning of the task variation than a
low amount
• Low contextual interference inhibits
performance in novel performance
contexts
Why does CIE occur?

Elaboration hypothesis (Morgan, 1979)
• Random practice engages one in more strategies
• Performer retains in working memory all the skill
variations
• Performer develops a memory representation of
the skil

Action plan reconstruction hypothesis
• Random practice requires performers to
reconstruct an action plan for each practice
trial
• Performer engages in more problem solving
Practice Specificity
Oldest principle of human learning
• When more of the elements of two skills or
situation have in common, the greater the
amount of transfer (Identical elements
theory).
• Three characteristics of Practice specificity
that applies to motor skills:
– Sensory/perceptual similarity
– Intentional & incidental remembering
– Similarity of cognitive processing
Sensory/Perceptual
Information
Learning a motor skill is specific to the
sources of sensory/perceptual information
available during practice:
• Visual sensory feedback is important in the early
stages but diminishes in importance with more
practice and is replaced by prioceptive feedback.
• If one has vision early in practice, vision remains an
essential source of sensory information throughout
the stages of learning.
• Observing a skilled performer influences one
performance.
Intentional & Incidental
remembering
Intentional remembering is where I refer you to
exact information about the performance or
situation I want you to remember.
Incidental remembering refers to information that
you remembered that was nonessential parts of
the performance or situation.
e.g. I ask you to estimate the speed of your
serve in tennis. One can also report the speed
(intentional)but also the where the ball landed
in the serve (incidental).
Incidental Remembered
Information
Research consistently shows that characteristics
of a practice environmental context that are not
part of the skill to be learned becomes part of
what gets learned (Wright & Shea, 1991, 1994).
• The point is people learn more about the context than they are
explicitly instructed to learn
• When these incidental parts occur during a test, they become cues,
or aids, to help retrieve of information related to performance.
• Practice should included as many features of the test
environment as possible in practice.
Similarity of Cognitive
Processes
• Transfer appropriate processing
concept
• When a person is learning a skill in
practice that requires the same type of
cognitive processing activities that will
be required in a testing situation.
Practice variability vs.
Practice specificity
These two concepts seemly conflict with each
other but:
• Practice variability relates to movement characteristics
of the skill performed in practice.
• Practice specificity relates to practice characteristics
such as
 Sensory-perceptual information
 Environmental context
 Cognitive processes
If we apply practice specificity principles to
learning a motor skill, the typical result is the
skill improves in practice but poor
adaptability results occur.
Application
• Practice specificity improves the skill but does
not assure one that the performer will be able to
perform the skill in a real life or game situation.
• Best practices or learning occurs when one
applies practice variability, contextual
interference, and practice specificity.
Learning Versus Performance
During Practice
• Has a coach ever said to you in practice “Do
your best” or have your used this phrase?
• How did you perform in that practice?
• The learner who attempts to perform as well as
possible in practice tends to be inhibited from
modifying movements from attempt to attempt.
• Practice is messy, expect mistakes and tell your
athlete that its good to make a mistake in
practice.
• Providing both practice sessions and test
sessions during practice can help overcome the
detriment to learning.
Benefits of Practice vs. Repetition
Practice:
• Improved capability to
perform some skill on
future demand
• Improved perceptual
skills
• Improved attention
through reduced
capacity demands and
reduced effector
competition
• Improved motor
programs
• Improved error detection
Repetition
• Improved capability to
perform some skill on
future demand in same
environment
• Improved perceptual skills
for environment practice
occurred in
• Improved attention through
reduced capacity demands
and reduced effector
competition
• Improved motor programs
for the isolated task and
environment
• Improved error detection
Stages of Learning
• Fitts’ stages were specifically designed
to consider perceptual–motor learning
placing heavy emphasis on how the
cognitive processes invested in motor
performance change as a function of
practice.
• Bernstein identified stages of learning
from a combined motor control and
biomechanical perspective.
Fitts’ Stage 1: Cognitive Stage
• The dominant questions concern goal
identification, performance evaluation,
what to do, when to do it.
• Verbal and cognitive abilities dominate,
and verbalizable information is useful.
• Gains in proficiency in this stage are
very rapid and large, indicating that
more effective strategies for
performance are being discovered.
Fitts’ Stage 2: Fixation Stage
• The learner’s focus shifts to organizing
more effective movement patterns.
• In skills requiring quick movements, such
as a tennis stroke, the learner begins to
build a motor program to accomplish the
movement requirements.
• In slower movements, such as balancing
in gymnastics, the learner constructs
ways to use movement-produced
feedback. (continued)
Fitts’ Stage 2: Fixation Stage
(continued)
• Inconsistency gradually decreases—
closed-skill movements begin to be more
stereotypic and those open-skill
movements become more adaptable.
• Enhanced movement efficiency reduces
energy costs, and self-talk becomes less
important for performance.
• Learners begin to monitor their own
feedback and detect their errors.
Fitts’ Stage 3: Autonomous
Stage
• It is usually associated with the
attainment of expert performance.
• The decreased attention demanded by
both perceptual and motor processes
frees the individual to perform
simultaneous higher-order cognitive
activities.
• Self-confidence increases and the
capability to detect and correct one’s own
errors becomes more fine-tuned.
Bernstein’s Stage 1: Reduce
Degrees of Freedom
• The initial problem facing the learner is
what to do with all of the possible
degrees of freedom of movement that
are available for the body.
• Bernstein considered that the solution
was to reduce the movement of
nonessential or redundant body parts
in the initial stage of learning by
freezing degrees of freedom.
Bernstein’s Stage 2: Release
Degrees of Freedom
• The learner attempts to improve
performance by releasing some of the
degrees of freedom that had initially
been frozen.
• Particularly useful in tasks that require
power or speed, because the degrees
of freedom that have been released
could allow for faster and greater
accumulation of forces.
Bernstein’s Stage 3: Exploit
Passive Dynamics
• The performer learns to exploit the
passive dynamics of the body—
essentially, the energy and motion that
come for free with the help of physics.
• The movement becomes maximally
skilled in terms of effectiveness
(achieving the result with maximum
assuredness) and efficiency (minimum
outlay of energy).
Limitations of Fitts’ and
Bernstein’s Stages
• Neither was meant to describe learning
as a series of discrete, nonlinear, and
unidirectional stages.
• Fitts considered performance change
to be regressive as well as progressive.
• Task differences also play an important
role in the stage views of both Fitts and
Bernstein.
Forgetting
• Long-term retention depends largely on
the nature of the task.
– Discrete tasks (especially those with a
relatively large cognitive component) are
forgotten relatively quickly.
– Continuous tasks are retained very well
over long periods of no practice.
– The amount of original practice will
influence the relative amount of retention
for these tasks.
Figure 9.4
Figure 9.5
Warm-Up Decrement
• Warm-up decrement refers to a specific
type of retention deficit due to the loss
of an activity set.
• Set is a collection of psychological
activities, states, or adjustment and
processes that are appropriate and
support performance while an activity
is ongoing.
Transfer and Similarity
• Transfer between skills depends on the
skills’ movement or perceptual
similarity.
• The concept of similarity among skills
involves several classes of common
features:
– Common movement patterning
– Common perceptual elements
– Common strategic or conceptual elements
Transfer of Part Practice to
Whole Performance
• Some skills are enormously complex;
in such situations the instructor cannot
present all aspects of the skill at once
for practice.
• An approach is to divide the task into
meaningful units that can be isolated
for separate part practice with the goal
of integrating the units into the whole
skill for later performance.
Principles of Part Practice
• For very slow, serial tasks with no
component interaction, part practice on
the difficult elements is very efficient.
• For very brief, programmed actions,
practice on the parts in isolation is
seldom useful and can be detrimental to
learning.
• The more the components of a task
interact with each other, the less the
effectiveness of part practice.
Simulation and Transfer
• A simulator is a practice device
designed to mimic features of a realworld task.
– Are often very elaborate, sophisticated,
and expensive but don’t need to be
– Can be an important part of an
instructional program, especially when the
skill is expensive or dangerous, where
facilities are limited, or where real practice
is not feasible
Physical Versus Psychological
Fidelity
• Fidelity is the degree to which the
simulator mimics the criterion task.
• Physical fidelity is the degree to which
the surface features of a simulation and
the criterion task are identical.
• Psychological fidelity is the degree to
which the behaviors produced in a
simulator are identical to the behaviors
required by the criterion task.
Summary & Application



Performing the skill to be learned in a variety of
ways maximizes performing it in future test
situation or real life situations.
Assess how the skill is performed in real life
situations and determine the type of practice based
on whether the skill is an open or closed.
Early in learning or relearning a skill start with
blocked practice then once they attain a degree of
success move them to serial and/or random
practice.