With everyone else, we think that task areas are largely a convenience, and it is thus not worth while to labor a definition of motor skills. Research in motor-skills learning is conducted for the same reason that any research is conducted. Learning is learning, regardless of Ss and apparatus, and we wish to make no point of motor-skills learning as opposed to verbal learning or conditioning. Nonetheless, we have tried to include only studies that are well within our crudely defined area of human motor-skills learning, how ever strong the temptation to follow a major variable through the �ingle unit T -maze and memory drum.Among the complex parts of human learning, we distinguish very roughly and with deliberate naivete as follows-motor skills: the hand holds and moves some physical apparatus, pencil and toggle-switch usually excepted, unless S cannot make the required movements at the start of practice ; ver bal learning: the task emphasizes words to be memorized; and perceptual learning: it is neither of the above and the senses are the most obvious ele ments of the task. A simpler way to say about the same thing is to distin guish areas according to the relative importance of the hand, tongue, and eye. Also implicit in motor-skills learning is the emphasis on learning to make R, rather than to select R on cue, an interpretation that has severely limited our review of push-button research.The danger of sorting research into convenient piles is that studies that land between piles may be overlooked. This is a problem not only in separat ing verbal from motor studies, but in separating human-factors engineering studies from skills learning. With both studying common performance (not learning) variables, the relationships between the two areas are too obvious to list; as a result, many fine pUblications at the interface will be neglected. An example is Krendel's (132) summary of performance experiments on man-powered devices. Spragg, Andreas, Green, Gerall, and many associates in the skills laboratory at Rochester have been steadily producing data on display-control relations and on the response properties of controls and di splays (21, 22, 23, 101 ). A long line of careful work by Smith (112,199, 1 This review covers the years 1945 through 1959. Previous reviews overlooked skills learning, so our expanded coverage cites critical articles from 1945-1955, but gives greatest emphasis to the years after 1955 as reference sources. The writers wish to acknowledge the financial contribution of the Graduate Council on Research of Tulane University and the support of the National Science Foundation.'The following abbreviations and symbols will be used: S (subject)'; E (ex perimenter) ; R (response) ; S-R (stimulus-response); KR (knowledge of results or feedback); In (reactive inhibition); sIn (conditioned inhibition). 243Annu. Rev. Psychol. 1961.12:243-280. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org Access provided by New York University -Bobst Library on 02/04/15. For personal use only.Quick links to online content Further...

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Subjects were trained in three psychomotor tasks (Rudder Control Test, Complex Coordination Test and Rotary Pursuit) to determine between group differences during acquisition and retention under varying distributions of practice during acquisition. Among the results it was found that manipulation of the distribution variable was accompanied by between group differences during acquisition, and performance tended to be a negative decay function of the intertrial interval.