Motor Learning Strategies for Well Elderly: A Pilot Study

Although motor learning strategies have been studied throughout the 20th century, relatively little is known about motor learning strategies that are specifically effective for older adults. The purpose of this study was to compare the skill acquisition, retention, and transfer of motor skills in older persons on relatively easy and relatively difficult tasks across varying frequencies of knowledge of results (KR). It was hypothesized that there would be a significant interaction upon task learning between frequency of KR and task difficulty for the acquisition, retention, and transfer phases. Participants included 61 right-hand dominant, well, elderly individuals, aged 60 to 87 years. The task involved turning a knob that controlled the height of a bar on a computer screen to match the height of a target bar. The target bar height and the time interval of the target bar were manipulated into four groups including the 100% KR/easy task, the 100% KR/hard task, the 33% KR/easy task and the 33% KR/hard groups. Participants were randomly assigned to these four groups. Although there was no significant interaction between group and time for the retention phase (p >.05), there were significant interactions in the acquisition and transfer phases between group and time (p <.05). The acquisition phase had a large disparity during the initial performance with the reduced KR groups having greater error that was eliminated in the final acquisition trials. In the transition phase, the 33% feedback/hard group demonstrated better performance across the trials than the other three groups. Based on these results, it may be beneficial to employ a reduced frequency feedback schedule when learning relatively difficult tasks for subsequent generalization of those learned skills by an elderly population, though more research beyond this pilot study is needed to corroborate these findings.