C H A P T E R
9
Skill Acquisition,
Retention, and Transfer
Chapter 9 Skill Acquisition, Retention, and 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.
– Practicing in a particular environment or workspace
often leads to better performance mainly in that
workspace.
– The sensory feedback resulting from performance
during specific types of practice becomes part of the
learned representation for skill.
Learning Versus Performance
During Practice
• The learner who attempts to perform as well
as possible in practice tends to be inhibited
from modifying movements from attempt to
attempt.
• Providing both practice sessions and test
sessions during practice can help overcome
the detriment to learning.
Benefits of 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
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—closedskill 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 higherorder 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 real-world 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.