The idea that motor tasks involving a strong emphasis on use of exteroceptive sources of information would be more resistant to the detrimental effects of heavy physical work than tasks of a highly interoceptive nature was tested. The design also allowed testing of the specificity hypothesis that practice should be under performance conditions having a specific criterion. 40 women were randomly assigned to either a control or an experimental group and received 75 practice trials on a new two-handed tracking task over 4 consecutive days. The control group practiced under conditions of heavy interpolated work on the first 3 days with Day 3 representing the heavy-work criterion, while the experimental group did the same except for Day 2 when they performed a letter-cancelling task instead of work. The second criterion condition which had no exercise stress was given to both groups on Day 4. A step-up exercise, which included use of the arms, was used to induce stress so that a heart rate of approximately 180 beats/min. was obtained prior to each minute of continuous practice on the tracking task. The results were in general agreement with the view that physical work does not detrimentally affect learning of highly perceptual tasks. Although the lack of significant differentiation of performance with and without work did not allow a clear test of the specificity hypothesis, under the stress criterion, the results suggested that the hypothesis did not hold for the present situation.
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