Movement preparation is not influenced by focus of attention
Bibliographic record
Abstract
According to the constrained action hypothesis, an internal focus of attention (FOA) results in a decrement in performance compared to an external FOA because it interferes with automatic movement control processes (Wulf, 2013). It is unknown whether this interference occurs during preparation of the motor command or during online control of the movement. Thus, the purpose of the study was to investigate the influence of FOA on the performance of a fast, ballistic movement, which reduces or eliminates the ability to use online control. It was hypothesized that if FOA influences the preparation of the motor command then an external FOA should result in better performance relative to an internal FOA. Participants completed two sessions consisting of 100 aiming trials each, involving a ballistic movement through one of five targets (20 cm from the home position along a circular arc) using a KINARM robot. Each session was completed using either an internal or external FOA (counterbalanced, separated by a minimum of 24 hours). When the target disappeared (go-signal), participants were to move “their thumb” (internal) or “the dot” on the KINARM handle directly below their thumb (external), as fast and accurately as possible directly through the centre of the remembered visual target without stopping. A virtual soft wall behind the targets assisted movement termination. Results revealed no difference in performance between FOA conditions, specifically no main effects of FOA were found for movement time, reaction time, error in the forward or horizontal planes, or resultant error (all p values > 0.05). These results indicate that FOA does not affect preparation of the motor command, and suggests that FOA primarily influences online control processes. Acknowledgments: Supported by NSERC (A.N.C. & E.K.C.), SSHRC (B.M) & OGS (N.M.D)
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 teacher head, 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".