An Application of Thurstone's Method of Factor Analysis to Practice Series

Motor Habits in Visuo-manual Tracking: Manifestation of an Unconscious Short-Term Motor Memory?

“…Motor learning has been extensively studied by subjecting inter-trial correlations of scores to factor analysis (Perl, 1934;Edgerton and Valentine, 1935;Fleishman and Hempel, 1955) and other correlational methods Gones, 1962). The resulting theory implies that motor skills are composed of a number of independent (basic) abilities, the relative importance of which changes continually in the course oflearning.…”

“…Thus, when inter-trial correlations of scores are arranged in a correlation matrix, they are highest near the diagonal and fall off with increasing distance. This "superdiagonal form" in practise matrices first attracted attention as early as 50 years ago (Viteles, 1933;Perl, 1934;Edgerton and Valentine, 1935;Greene, 1943). On the basis of factor-analytic studies, this effect was explained by the gradual emergence and disappearance of different skills in the course of motor learning, finally resulting in a stable simplification with the involvement of a small number of basic abilities (for discussion, see Jones, 1966).…”

A Review and Extension of Current Models of Dynamic Criteria

“…Although a few investigators (e.g., have disputed the existence of the simplex, a simplex pattern or a simplexlike pattern is ubiquitous among repeated measures of performance, including job performance (Deadrick and Madigan 1990;Hofmann, Jacobs and Baratta 1993), academic performance (Humphreys 1968), teaching performance (Hanges et al 1990) and sport performance (Hofmann, Jacobs and Gerras 1992). Kincaid (1925) and Perl (1934) were among the first to comment on the occurrence of a simplex pattern, noting a tendency of experiments with practice periods to show lower correlations between initial and final ability measures, compared with measures closely spaced in time. Jones (1962), in an explanation of the simplex pattern in the context of skill acquisition, posited that a simplification process underlies skill acquisition.…”

Transfer of reactive inhibition as a function of prior training on the inhibitory task

“…To the contrary, however, Huang and Payne (1977) found that work inhibition transferred equally from two alternate tasks to the main task, despite differences in their similarities to the main task. Although the weight of evidence seems to favor the Hullian variant of inhibition theory, studies of intertrial correlation patterns and their factorial content (Fleishman & Hempel, 1954;Jones, 1962Jones, , 1966Noble, 1970;Perl, 1934;Reynolds, 1952), as well as trial-totrial analyses of performance (Ammons, Ammons, & Morgan, 1958;Archer, 1958), suggested that there may be special conditions under which the task-specificity conception of work inhibition is valid. Collectively, these studies seem to have shown that, as practice proceeds, irrelevant responses drop out, variance common to other tasks declines, and residual response patterns become more highly task specific.…”