Psychologica l Bul le t in MOVEMENT CONTROL IN SKILLED MOTOR PERFORMANCE1

The speed and accuracy of single movements depend on several factors, such as direction of movement, distance to the target, and accompaniment by simul-taneous movements. The relation between speed, accuracy, and distance appears to be determined by the time required to process feedback and to make cor-rective alterations in the movement. For a repetitive series of movements, there is some evidence suggesting that control is shifted from feedback to a motor program. This view receives further support from demonstrations that the reproduction of single movements may be under programmed control. How the study of movements may be relevant to understanding perceptual and memory skills, as well as motor skills, is briefly mentioned. The study of movements has great im-portance for understanding skilled perform-ance. This is, of course, most obvious for motor skills such as walking, driving, typing, parts assembly, athletics and so on. Psychologists long have believed that movements are an im-portant component of nonmotor skills as well. For example, Watson (1924) was a proponent of the view that thought involved minute movements of the vocal apparatus. Such a view has been discounted for many years, but recently motor theories of "thought " have been regaining acceptance. Hintzman (196S, 1967) recently has suggested that the auditory confusion errors in short-term memory are not of acoustic origin but are of articulatory origin. Rehearsal, according to Hintzman, in-volves subvocal articulatory movements, and it is the kinesthetic feedback from such move-ments that accounts for short-term memory. Thus, the research on kinesthetic memory re-ported later in this paper is relevant to the-ories of auditory short-term memory. xThe preparation of this article was supported b