This article reports the first year results of a pilot study of 21 developmental milestones achieved by 82 visually impaired children in New York City. Some delays in visual-motor activities were found, as well as differences in the sequence of acquiring skills. Children with additional handicaps acquired milestones at a slower rate. (Author/DB)

Further commentary on distributed practice and the acquisition of motor skills points out that there are at least two viable theoretical perspectives that can be brought to bear on issues surrounding the acquisition of perceptual-motor skills. (JD)

Describes two experiments which examined how supplementing specific practice experiences with variable practice experiences influenced motor skill retention. Participants received varying trials of acquisition practice on a criterion force production task. Acquisition practice with variations of the criterion task led to better retention than…

The study, with 32 adolescents with mild mental retardation and controls, found that imagery practice facilitated the execution of the reaction time component of a motor task and sometimes facilitated performance of the movement time component of the motor task. (DB)

After 72 sessions for 3 hours per week, significantly more children aged 5-9 receiving sensory integration (SI) therapy (n=35) and perceptual motor training (n=35) showed improvement in SI functioning compared to 33 receiving no treatment. Similar effects were found for subgroups with vestibular dysfunction only (n=11, 13, and 11 respectively).…

Retrospective analysis of videotape recordings taken at 9 to 12 months of 11 children with autism, 10 with developmental disabilities, and 11 typically developing children found that nine behavioral items, in combination, discriminated the three groups 94 percent of the time. Results support early identification of autism and that infant…

This study compared effects of visual occlusion on the motor and spatial learning of 28 legally blind adult males, half due to acuity loss and half due to peripheral field restriction. For both groups, occlusion appeared neither to facilitate nor impede motor learning but did significantly impair acquisition of spatial relations. Results have…

This study examined consequences of the comorbidity of developmental coordination disorder (DCD) and learning disability (LD) for the severity and pattern of perceptual-motor dysfunction. Compared to children with only DCD, those with DCD and LD had poorer perceptual-motor ability, with particular difficulty performing manual dexterity and balance…

The experiments examined qualitative and quantitative changes in the dynamics of learning a novel motor skill (roller ball task) as a function of the manipulation of a control parameter (initial ball speed). The focus was on the relation between the rates of change in performance over practice time and the changing time scales of the evolving…

When a sensory cue was repeatedly followed by a behavioral event with fixed delays, pairs of premotor and primary motor neurons showed significant increases of coincident spikes at times a monkey was expecting the event. These results provided evidence that neuronal firing synchrony has predictive power. To elucidate the underlying mechanism, here…

Olfactory discrimination (OD) learning consists of two phases: an initial N-methyl-d-aspartate (NMDA) receptor--sensitive rule-learning phase, followed by an NMDA receptor (NMDAR)--insensitive pair-learning phase. The rule-learning phase is accompanied by changes in the composition and function of NMDARs at synapses in the piriform cortex,…

Autonomously developing organisms face several challenges when learning reaching movements. First, motor control is learned unsupervised or self-supervised. Second, knowledge of sensorimotor contingencies is acquired in contexts in which action consequences unfold in time. Third, motor redundancies must be resolved. To solve all 3 of these…

Article investigated perceptual-motor areas, as they are related to music activities. (RK)

Criticized is a study which compared 19 retarded and 19 advanced grade 3 readers and concluded that the presence of three or more perceptual or psycholinguistic immaturities was likely to be a critical factor in reading ability. (DB)

Ten replication studies based on quantitative procedures developed to measure motor and sensory/motor skill acquisition among handicapped and nonhandicapped infants and children are presented. Each study follows the original assessment procedures, and emphasizes the stability of interobserver reliability across time, consistency in the response…