Humans are constantly faced with learning motor tasks throughout their lifespan (e.g., children learning how to throw a ball overhand, elite athletes learning how to become more even more efficient at their sports performance, and an older adult relearning how to walk post-stroke recovery). With such variety in the types of motor tasks that humans try to learn across the lifespan, little is known about the impact of a learner’s previous motor skill experience. Thus, the purpose of this thesis was to investigate when motor learning generalizability or specificity are more likely to occur, respectively. An in-depth background of motor learning generalizability and specificity was provided in chapter one. The scope of the motor learning literature including generalizability and/or specificity was investigated in chapter two. At the end of chapter two, certain limitations of the motor learning literature are addressed and framed into a useable checklist for future motor learning experiments. Chapter three serves as a bridging chapter to connect the scoping review and checklist in chapter two, to the framework implemented in chapter four. In chapter four, the checklist was employed to assess its usefulness in future motor learning experiments. Collectively, this thesis provides organization to the previous motor learning generalizability and specificity literature, as well as recommendations for future motor learning researchers based on a tested framework protocol. / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / Our previous movement experiences can impact our capability to learn new motor tasks. These previous movement experiences can be either beneficial or detrimental (or have no effect) on our learning of that task depending on many different things with no real definitive answers to why the outcomes differ and when. The purpose of this thesis is to review how prior motor skill practice may be beneficial to future motor skill learning (generalizability), detrimental to learning, or no effect (specificity) and to organize these findings into a new ‘types of transfer’ taxonomy, create a framework to help guide future motor learning research and conduct an experiment that follows this framework. By considering and organizing this large motor learning literature into a review, creating this taxonomy and outlining an empirical investigative framework, this thesis will help us to better understand motor learning history and provide a pathway forward for future researchers.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:mcmaster.ca/oai:macsphere.mcmaster.ca:11375/29594 |
| Date | January 2024 |
| Creators | Tuckey, Claire |
| Contributors | Lyons, Jim, Kinesiology |
| Source Sets | McMaster University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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