Using a quantitative assessment of propulsion biomechanics in wheelchair racing to guide the design of personalized gloves: a case study.

This study with a T-52 class wheelchair racing athlete aimed to combine quantitative biomechanical measurements to the athlete's perception to design and test different prototypes of a new kind of rigid gloves. Three personalized rigid gloves with various, fixed wrist extension angles were prototyped and tested on a treadmill in a biomechanics laboratory. The prototype with 45° wrist extension was the athlete's favourite as it reduced his perception of effort.

Observational Learning: Tell Beginners What They Are about to Watch and They Will Learn Better.

Observation aids motor skill learning. When multiple models or different levels of performance are observed, does learning improve when the observer is informed of the performance quality prior to each observation trial or after each trial? We used a knock-down barrier task and asked participants to learn a new relative timing pattern that differed from that naturally emerging from the task constraints (Blandin et al., 1999).

Self-Control of Task Difficulty During Early Practice Promotes Motor Skill Learning.

This study was designed to determine whether the effect of self-control of task difficulty on motor learning is a function of the period of self-control administration. In a complex anticipation-coincidence task that required participants to intercept 3 targets with a virtual racquet, the task difficulty was either self-controlled or imposed to the participants in the two phases of the acquisition session. First, the results confirmed the beneficial effects of self-control over fully prescribed conditions.

Mixed observation favors motor learning through better estimation of the model's performance.

Observation contributes to motor learning. It was recently demonstrated that the observation of both a novice and an expert model (mixed observation) resulted in better learning of a complex spatio-temporal task than the observation of either a novice or an expert model alone. In the present study, we sought to determine whether the advantage of mixed observation resulted from the development of a better error detection mechanism.

Observation learning of a motor task: who and when?

Observation contributes to motor learning. It was recently demonstrated that the observation of both a novice and an expert model (mixed observation) resulted in better learning of a complex spatiotemporal task than the observation of either a novice or an expert model. In experiment 1, we aimed to determine whether mixed observation better promotes learning due to the information that can be gained from two models who exhibit different skill levels or simply because multiple models, regardless of their level of expertise, better promote learning than would a single model.

Self-control of task difficulty during training enhances motor learning of a complex coincidence-anticipation task.

The aim of the present work was to analyze the influence of self-controlled task difficulty on motor learning. Participants had to intercept three targets falling at different velocities by displacing a stylus above a digitizer Task difficulty corresponded to racquet width. Half the participants (self-control condition) could choose the racquet width at the beginning of each trial.