Spacing practice sessions across days benefits the learning of motor skills
Section snippets
Experiment 1
The purpose of Experiment 1 was to determine the impact of spacing practice sessions across days on the performance and learning of a continuous balance task. Consistent with the tenets of the memory consolidation hypothesis and the findings of Baddeley and Longman (1978), spacing practice across days should result in enhanced performance and learning (memory development) compared to practice sessions which are spaced only relatively short periods of time apart (e.g., 20 min). However, it
Experiment 2
The purpose of Experiment 2 was to extend the findings from Experiment 1 by determining the generalizability of the “day” effect to discrete tasks. For this purpose, a discrete timing task, that had been utilized a number of times in previous research (e.g., Lai and Shea, 1998, Wulf et al., 1994) and shown to be sensitive to various practice manipulations, was chosen. Lee and Genovese (1988) argued that, in general, the practice distribution literature in the motor domain tended not to reveal
General discussion
In this study, we examined the impact of spacing practice sessions across days relative to spacing practice sessions within a day on stabiliometer (Experiment 1) and key-press timing (Experiment 2) tasks. The results of a limited amount of previous research in the motor domain (e.g., Ammons, 1950, Baddeley and Longman, 1978, Brashers-Krug et al., 1996, Murphy, 1916) suggests that distributing practice sessions across relatively long intervals (e.g., days) may significantly benefit learning
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