Acquisition of a Simple Motor Response as Influenced by the Presence or Absence of Action Visual Feedback

Two experiments were performed to evaluate the learning properties of action visual feedback in comparison to standard terminal feedback, in Exp. 1, 144 Ss practiced for 0, 4, or 12 trials with action feedback on a simple motor task and were then transferred to terminal feedback. Amount of transfer was a negatively accelerated growth function of number of trials devoted to action feedback training. In Exp. 2, 122 Ss were trained under one of four conditions of action or terminal feedback and were then tested without information feedback (IF). No group showed a significant deterioration in accuracy during the no-IF test period. In addition, action IF + 1 responses during training compared favorably with the corresponding responses of a standard terminal IF condition. Previously reported failures of action IF to benefit learning are discussed, with emphasis directed toward the need for more analytic considerations of task intrinsic sources of IF.