Outreach posts
Publicly-funded research belongs in the public domain and it is our duty to make our research understandable. Here you will find posts that try to explain our research in a way that is user friendly. Many of the students in the lab will have written these posts and often these students have been directly involved in this research. It is our aim over the next few years to grow this site to provide summaries of all our newly published research. Please add your own comments and get involved with the discussion. And feel free to email us to let us know what you think or would like to see included here.
Do your movements have a “mind” of their own? When watching leads to unintended doing
Many movements we perform on a daily basis are preplanned in our brains well before we intend to execute them. For example, when a sprinter takes the blocks in a race, they have a very good idea of what movements they need to produce when the starting signal is heard. If this starting sound is above a certain level (124 dB) it may elicit what is called a startle response. This startle...
Describing changes in the brain with practice
Working with Katie Wadden and Lara Boyd (in the Brain and Behaviour Lab, UBC), we have recently assembled a data base of neuroimaging studies exploring motor learning. These studies involve a range of skill types, tasks (one-handed, two-handed), and (most importantly) different durations of training.By analyzing different time scales of practice, we can get a sense of how activity in the...
How ice hockey players and fans understand hockey talk
Nicole Ong, in collaboration with Scott Sinnett (at the University of Hawaii) and other members of the Motor Skills Lab, recently had an experiment accepted for publication in Acta Psychologica. In this experiment, we wanted to explore how people understand action-related sentences and how this understanding might rely on the motor system (in addition to verbal and visual systems).When...
Mixing it up a little: Benefits of interspersing demonstrations with physical practice
Should we spend all of our practice time physically attempting skills, or is it good to intersperse our practice attempts watching someone else? In this study we required learners to practice aiming movements in a novel environment where they had to learn new relations between actions and visual outcomes. We showed that MIXED practice (in this case 25% physical practice, 75% observing) facilitated both strategy learning as well as a more robust measure of implicit (automatic) motor-learning, in comparison to either method alone. In a previous study we had shown...
Avoid body-focused instructions, especially early in practice
Having been a coach/educator myself, I can relate to the practitioner’s urge to value-add to students’ and athletes’ learning. We tend to offer prescriptive (“what-to” or “how-to”) instructions for various reasons; perhaps because this is how we were instructed, because it justifies our role as the authority/expert or most probably, because of our belief that doing so...
Observing leads to a different type of learning than acting, being more verbal and strategic
If someone informed you that learning a skill through demonstration was no different from learning by physically performing the skill itself, your first reaction to this news might be suspicion and/or disbelief. However, this piece of information would seem more plausible if you were aware of developments in neurophysiology pertaining to the discovery of “mirror neurons”, first in macaque monkeys then subsequently in the human brain. A multitude of studies have since shown that a circuitry of cortical neurons normally activated during physical movement is also...
It’s not enough just to feel or see what’s correct, you need to 'actively' experience
Have you ever wondered how effective it is to physically guide a person through an action? In sports, the instructor might hold a person's arm to show them how to hit a golf ball or strike a volleyball serve. In rehabilitation, robotic devices are used to guide a person's limb for therapy purposes. What we and others have shown is that this technique is useful when applied, but that it compromises learning...
