Distribuição de prática no processo adaptativo em aprendizagem motora

Abstract

Introduction: Practice distribution refers to the temporal proportion attributed to practice and rest, involving decisions regarding their durations and frequencies, that is, the moments when rest intervals are administered between trials, blocks and/or between sessions. There is evidence of advantages of distributed practice in motor learning and that the characteristics of the task can determine the effects of this distribution. However, few studies have investigated the effect of this variable on the learning of serial skills, which, for not being short in duration, can lead to accumulation of fatigue, impacting performance and learning, and under the model of adaptive process in motor learning, practice distribution has not been investigated as an independent variable. Aim: To investigate the effect of practice distribution on the adaptive process in learning a serial task. Method: Participated in this study, 20 men and 40 women, with a mean of 26.5 ±5.1 years, graduates (26) and undergraduates (34), right-handed (56) and left-handed (4), with no experience in the serial reaction time task to be learned, normal vision or with corrected vision, without physical disability in the dominant upper limb. Participants were matched by sex in two groups: Massified, 100 trials without rest, and Distributed, five blocks of 20 trials, with two minutes of rest between them. The task consisted to perform, as quickly as possible, 10 mouse clicks on circular targets that were presented sequentially on the monitor. The design contained the phases: pre-test (20 trials without knowledge of results - KR), stabilization (100 trials with KR) and adaptation (35 trials, with sequence modification and without KR). The dependent variable was the total time (TT) of movement and the subjective perception of physical (PF) and mental fatigue (MF), evaluated using a visual analogue scale before the pre-test and at the end of stabilization, were the complementary measures. For descriptive analysis, mean and standard error were used (TT in blocks of five trials) and for inferential Wilcoxon and Mann Whitney U tests. Results: Both groups increased PF and MF with practice (pre-test and stabilization), but there was no significant difference between groups. In the last block of the pre-test, there was no difference in TT between groups, indicating that they started with similar performance. Both groups reduced the TT from the first to the last block of stabilization (large effect size). In the last block of stabilization, the Distributed group had a lower TT than the Massified group (medium effect size). With the task modification, there was a tendency for the Distributed group to be superior in the first block of the adaptation (small effect size), and superiority in the second block (medium effect size), in the subsequent blocks there was no difference between groups. Conclusion: Distributed practice and mass practice resulted in similar levels of subjective perception of mental fatigue and physical fatigue. However, distributed practice promoted stabilization at a higher level of performance and resulted in superiority in the adaptive process in learning a serial reaction time task.