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Research Areas


Introduction

Our research is primarily supported by funds from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC). Although the mandates of these two programs of research are guided primarily by the desire to understand the principles which guide motor learning, the two programs of research differ in their emphasis and are divided into the specific areas you see below.


SSHRC: Effective instruction for the learning and performance of motor skills

The long term aim of this research is to determine how effective instructions facilitate motor skill performance and acquisition. This aim is achieved through relatively short-term measures of performance and learning and through cross-sectional comparisons of skilled and less skilled performers. In this research the specific aims are to:

  1. explore the timing of instructional information;
  2. evaluate instructional effects under conditions of competitive stress;
  3. study the effects of different instructional manipulations across various skill levels;
  4. determine methods for improving motor performance at higher levels of skill.


NSERC: Perceptual & motor constraints in learning coordination skills

The general question driving this program of research is that of understanding what and how visual information is used to guide the performance and learning of motor skills. The specific interest is in determining:

  1. the role of visual-spatial information in bringing about coordination;
  2. how the perception of novel and complex coordination behaviours change as a function of practice;
  3. how perception and action co-develop during practice and;
  4. in finding methods which exploit visual-spatial information to facilitate learning.
These questions are examined through the manipulation of visual-spatial constraints in dual-limb and whole-body coordination tasks.



Instructions


This research involves examination of the mechanisms underlying effective instruction. This includes the content of the information, the direction of attention and the timing of provision. The interest is in how instructions impact on immediate performance, retention, transfer and performance under competitive conditions. Laboratory-based methods involving between group comparisons are typically used to ascertain how instructions affect the learning process in terms of outcome and form measures.

Sample publications


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Expert Sensori-Motor Performance


The expertise paradigm is used to understand the processes underlying successful performance. The interest is in the nature of the visual-motor control strategies which define performance at high levels of motor skill. Manipulation of the information or the control strategy of the performer is usually achieved through visual occlusion methods, perturbation or attention-directing instructions.

Sample Publications


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Expert Performance & Practice


The expertise paradigm is also used to further understand the processes underlying successful performance, particularly with reference to deliberate practice theory and the development and maintenance of expert levels of motor performance. Questionnaire and diary methods are typically used to ascertain practice information which are validated through interviews and observation.

Sample Publications


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Practice Conditions


The goal of this line of research is to determine the nature of the learning process and to explore optimal conditions for practice with reference to such variables as feedback and practice scheduling. Video feedback technologies are typically used to manipulate the information provided to the performer and learning is assessed through changes in outcome success and movement kinematics.

Sample Publications


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Observational Learning


Left (from Gavin Breslin, former PhD student, Queens University).

A particular goal of this research is to examine the nature of information extracted and used from demonstrations when children and adults observe with the intention to acquire and refine movement skills. One method for ascertaining this information is to selectively occlude or make salient particular features of the action (such as relative motion information or end-point features).

Sample Publications


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Coordination & Performance Strategies


In this research the aim is to understand how vision plays a role in the performance and acquisition of complex motor skills. A coordination paradigm has been adopted to examine the learning process and the types of constraints (typically visual) which limit and encourage acquisition and performance across individuals of varying levels of ability.

Sample Publications


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Motor Control & special Populations

I have a general interest in motor behaviour processes that help us understand how we control movement. This is necessary to understand how changes can take place as a function of practice. Current research involves examination of distal action effects (and inhibition of return phenomena) for the planning and execution of manual aiming movements

Sample Publications