Concurrent Visual Feedback, Practice Organization, and Spatial Aiming Accuracy in Rapid Movement Sequences

While the availability of visual feedback is a well-known factor influencing the accuracy of rapid aiming movements, little is known about how vision might interact with a contextual variable like practice organization. In the current study, the interaction of concurrent visual feedback (CVF) and practice organization on aiming movement accuracy was investigated in the dominant limb of 40 college-aged participants. Participants performed "triplets" of rapid aiming movements with a lightweight lever in the sagittal plane involving short (20°), medium (40°), long (60°) distances and were randomly assigned to one of four groups (n=10) in a 2 (Group: Blocked Practice, Random Practice) × 2 (Vision: CVF, no CVF) factorial design. Participants performed 24 triplets in acquisition and 10 triplets of a novel pattern (15°-45°-15°) on transfer. Movement time was controlled by a metronome set at 1.43 cycles per second resulting in a cycle time of approximately 700 ms per movement. The constant error and overall error in distance were calculated for each distance and analyzed with separate 2 (Group) × 2 (Vision) × 3 (Movement) ANOVAs with repeated measures on the last factor. When CVF was available, contextual interference effects were shown by better accuracy for the blocked practice groups during acquisition compared to the random practice group. Without CVF, participants tended to overshoot the targets and contextual interference effects were minimized during acquisition and on the first transfer trial. Random practice resulted in better transfer performance compared to blocked practice for both vision conditions when all transfer trials were included in the analysis. The findings contributed to the current literature by demonstrating the importance of practice context and visual feedback to aiming accuracy.