Effect of Focus of Attention and Age on Motor Acquisition, Retention, and Transfer: A Randomized Trial
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE: Adult participants benefit more from external focus than internal focus when learning a new motor skill. Because learners from different age groups use different learning strategies, the purpose of this study was to investigate whether the effect of attention focus varies among children and adults. SUBJECTS AND METHODS: Thirty-four children and 32 adults were randomly assigned to internal or external focus-of-attention practice groups. Throwing darts toward a static target, participants performed 50 acquisition trials, 20 retention trials, and 20 transfer trials. RESULTS: The results indicate that focus of attention varies between children and adults in accuracy and variability in the acquisition phase and in accuracy in the transfer phase. No interactions were found in the retention phase. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION: The findings suggest that external focus is more effective than internal focus in adults; therefore, physical therapists should instruct adult clients to focus their attention externally to facilitate motor learning. Physical therapists working with children should perhaps direct the client's attention internally; however, further study is needed.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.012 | 0.020 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.014 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".