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Updated: May 26, 2026

Investigating Motor Skill Learning Processes with a Robotic Manipulandum
Published on: February 12, 2017
A prelearning manipulation falsifies a pure associational deficit account of retrieval shift during skill acquisition
Jarrod Hines1, Christopher Hertzog, Dayna Touron
1School of Psychology, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA 30332-0170, USA.
Abstract:
Older adults adopt memory-based response strategies during consistent practice more slowly and less completely than younger adults. In two experiments, participants either prelearned all, half, or none of the noun-pair stimuli prior to the completion of a standard noun-pair lookup task. Higher proportions of prelearning generally led to a faster and more complete strategic shift from visual scanning to memory retrieval during the lookup task, and a strong prelearning criterion for all items eliminated the age-related slowing of retrieval shift. However, the 50% prelearned condition resulted in strategy shift that was inconsistent with simple mechanistic associative learning, revealing a strategic set that was retrieval-avoidant in older adults.
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