Motor Behavior and Human Skill: A Multidisciplinary Approach

Motor Behavior and Human Skill outlines the most recent research in motor control and human skill. The book's 20 chapters provide a forum for analyses of the many diverse theoretical approaches used in the understanding of motor control, including the cognitive, dynamical systems, computational, and neurological approaches.

Written by leading researchers in the field, this wide-ranging book includes something for all who are interested in motor control and behavior, no matter what their discipline. The authors, an international array of experts in the field, describe recent research in motor control and reflect the multidisciplinary approaches to motor behavior.

Two special sections on motor development and motor disability are featured, including new findings for intervention programs. One of the concluding chapters, "Has Ecological Psychology Delivered What It Promised?" by Jeff Summers, is followed by four insightful commentaries.

Issues in Part I include:

-attentional and nonattentional learning,

-the interference of distance and location information in motor short-term memory,

-cognitive strategies, and

-the importance of sensory feedback in skill development.
An information-processing approach is adopted in Part II through the analysis of motor performance in terms of computational modeling. Research based on the dynamical systems approach is presented in Part III, including

-the important contribution of variability,

-manual asymmetries and intentional switching in bimanual tasks, and

-muscular-skeletal constraints upon coordination dynamics.
Part IV reviews recent research on normal and abnormal motor development in infancy and childhood. Part V concerns primarily the application of motor control theories to movement disability. Part VI examines the ongoing debate between the prescriptive approaches and the ecological or dynamical systems approaches.

Motor Behavior and Human Skill provides a lively and varied forum for analyzing the many theoretical approaches used to understand motor control, motor learning, and motor development.

Jan P. Piek, PhD, is a research fellow at the Curtin University of Technology in Perth, Australia. Her major areas of research are motor control and motor development. Since 1992 she has received three research fellowships to conduct work in motor control.

Piek has published widely in journals in Australia and internationally. She contributed a chapter on spontaneous movements in the acquisition of motor coordination in infants to D.J. Glencross and J.P. Piek's Motor Control and Sensory-Motor Integration: Issues and Directions (Amsterdam: Elsevier Science, 1995).

Piek has coordinated the Motor Control & Human Skill Research Workshops since the program's inception in 1991. She is a member of the School of Psychology at Curtin University of Technology, where she also manages the Research Centre for Applied Psychology. She received the Vice-Chancellor's Award for Excellence from Curtin University of Technology in 1996. Her most recent fellowship is the Curtin University Postdoctoral Research Fellowship, from 1997 to 2000.

Jan and her husband Bill live in Ballajura, Western Australia. Her favorite leisure activities include reading, fishing, and walking.