Snoddy (1926) revisited: time scales of motor learning

The authors investigated the time scales of the learning of a mirror-tracing task to reexamine G. S. Snoddy's (1926) original claim and the received theoretical view (A. Newell & P. S. Rosenbloom, 1981) that motor learning follows a power law. Adult participants (N = 16) learned the tracing task in either a normal or a reversed visual-image condition over 5 consecutive days of practice and then performed 1 day of practice 1 week later and again 1 month later. The reversed-image group's performance was poorer than that of the normal-image group throughout the practice. An exponential was the best fitting function on individual data, but the power-law function was the best fit on the group-averaged data. The findings provided preliminary evidence that 2 characteristic time scales, (a) fast, dominated by warm-up, and (b) slow, dominated by persistent change, capture individuals' performance in the learning of the mirror-tracing task.