Successive Approximations to a Model of Human Motor Programming

doi:10.1016/S0079-7421(08)60028-6

Psychology of Learning and Motivation

Volume 21, 1988, Pages 153-182

https://doi.org/10.1016/S0079-7421(08)60028-6 Get rights and content

Publisher Summary

This chapter describes a series of experiments on the cognitive activity that immediately precedes and allows the execution of voluntary actions. Cognitive activity is referred to as “motor programming” and its resultant representations are referred to as “motor programs.” The control of finger sequences is important in keyboard entry and musical performances. Finger sequences can be performed extremely rapidly and can be executed without direct conscious control. The chapter describes the processes of motor programming and the structure of motor programs. The data of interest are the times and identities of produced responses. If the timing of responses within a sequence changes as a function of an alternative sequence, the changes can be attributed to the operations underlying the programming of the sequence to be performed. A corollary of the motor-program editor model is that successive response sequences can be programmed by changing features that distinguish one sequence from the next. This method of programming is more efficient than the one in which each sequence must be programmed from scratch regardless of its relation to the sequence that has just been performed.

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One set of studies has focused on a hierarchy of different levels of representation (e.g., see Saltzman, 1979; Keele, 1986; Rosenbaum, 1987; Perrig and Hofer, 1989). Other studies, in contrast, have focused more strongly on the aspect of a hierarchic execution regulation (e.g., Rosenbaum, 1987; Greene, 1988; Keele et al., 1990; Hacker, 1998). In contrast, the model proposed here views the functional construction of actions (Schack, 2004b; Schack and Bar-Eli, 2007; Schack and Hackfort, 2007) on the basis of a reciprocal assignment of performance-oriented regulation levels and representational levels (see Table 1).
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In a prescient paper Karl Lashley (1951) rejected reflex chaining accounts of the sequencing of behavior and argued instead for a more cognitive account in which behavioral sequences are typically controlled with central plans. An important feature of such plans, according to Lashley, is that they are hierarchical. Lashley offered several sources of evidence for the hierarchical organization for behavioral plans, and others afterward provided more evidence for this hypothesis. We briefly review that evidence here and then shift from a focus on the structure of plans (Lashley’s point of concentration) to the processes by which plans are formed in real time. Two principles emerge from the studies we review. One is that plans are not formed from scratch for each successive movement sequence but instead are formed by making whatever changes are needed to distinguish the movement sequence to be performed next from the movement sequence that has just been performed. This plan-modification view is supported by two phenomena discovered in our laboratory: the parameter remapping effect, and the handpath priming effect. The other principle we review is that even single movements appear to be controlled with hierarchically organized plans. At the top level are the starting and goal postures. At the lower level are the intermediate states comprising the transition from the starting posture to the goal posture. The latter principle is supported by another phenomenon discovered in our lab, the end-state comfort effect, and by a computational model of motor planning which accounts for a large number of motor phenomena. Interestingly, the computational model hearkens back to a classical method of generating cartoon animations that relies on the production of keyframes first and the production of interframes (intermediate frames) second.
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Successive Approximations to a Model of Human Motor Programming

Publisher Summary

Acta Psychologica

Journal of Memory and Language

Acta Psychologica

The architecture of cognition

Hierarchical retrieval schemes in recall of categorized word lists

Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior

Iconic memory and visible persistence

Perception & Psychophysics

An efferent component in the visual perception of direction and extent

Psychological Review

Processing symbolic information from a visual display: Interference from an irrelevant directional cue

Journal of Experimental Psychology

Stimulus-response compatibility and motor programming of manual response sequences

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance

On the relationship between sentence structure and the latency in generating the sentence

Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior

The role of chunking and organization in the process of recall

Connectedness and binary branching

The problem of serial order in behavior

Biological foundations of language