Efeitos da distribuição da prática sobre a aquisição de habilidade motoras por adultos jovens e idosos

Abstract

Human motricity undergoes modifications throughout the lifespan. Aging processes brings inchanges which are relevant to practice organization, which makes practice scheduling(massed-distributed) a factor to be considered as it may influence information processing andmemory consolidation. The main purpose of this study was to investigate practice schedulingeffects on the learning process of a serial coincident timing task by young and older adults.Two questions were proposed to investigate these effects: the first one was about the behaviorof performance and variability during the process, and the second concerned on how practicescheduling would influence the acquisition of structures responsible for movement control.Four intervention groups were created with eight subjects in each: elderly-massed, elderlydistributed,young-massed, and young-distributed. The timing task consisted of touching fivesensors in a pre-arranged sequence following a tail o light. Movement began after a lightstimulus and should finish coinciding with the end of a series of lighting diodes. The studywas divided in three stages: acquisition, transfer and retention. In the acquisition aperformance criteria of three right answers in a whole was established to conclusion. Toanswer to the first question absolute error (EA) and variability of EA were compared duringacquisition, between acquisition and transfer, acquisition and retention, and throughouttransfer and retention phases. To answer to the second question, after-effects of acquisitionover transfer and of transfer over retention were analyzed by means of constant error. Resultsshowed no between group differences in the acquisition, but all groups showed error andvariability reductions. In the transfer and retention elderly-massed results showed to beinferior in both performance and variability. There was no scheduling effect on after-effects,but an age effect was show on transfer with both elderly groups showing more pronouncedafter-effects than the young. Results enabled to verify that the elderly are more susceptible toscheduling effects than are the young as massed practice schedule leads to impoverishedlearning in the elderly and distributed practice enables them to achieve learning performancesimilar to those of the young. In what concerns the development of control structures, it couldbe observed that both elderly groups have more need for developing such structures than dothe young, but that distributed practice enables the elderly to develop more sophisticatedcontrol via feedback which results in more flexible control to this group in relation to theelderly-massed group.