The Relative Weightings of Visual and Nonvisual Coding in a Simple Motor Learning Task

Abstract

A linear positioning task was used to examine the effects of visual and nonvisual inputs on motor learning. The experiment had three factors with two levels of each, namely: sensory modality (visual-nonvisual), transfer at recall (changed-unchanged), size of movement (25.4 cm, 50.8 cm). Three dependent variables were used: absolute error (AE), constant error (CE), and variable error (VE). The results suggest that visual dominance causes disruption of recall in the visual, changed, conditions. No disruption of recall was found for the nonvisual condition other than in terms of CE with respect to movement sizes. The results are taken to follow Posner et al.’s (1976) theory of visual dominance, but some account of the spatial qualities of visual and kinesthetic information is needed.