Antoinette (Ann) Gentile, Professor Emerita at Teachers College, Columbia University passed away at the age of 79 on February 7, 2016. She spent 44 years at Teachers College on the faculties of Movement Science and Psychology and was a leader in movement science and neuromotor research. She was a pioneer in applying theories of brain function to the treatment of individuals who had experienced strokes or neurological conditions, ushering in a new era in rehabilitation. Along with her colleagues, Ann established the first interdisciplinary graduate program in Motor Learning at Teachers College. Many graduates became leaders in Kinesiology, Physical Education and Rehabilitation (Physical and Occupational Therapy). She was an Associate Editor at the Journal of Motor Behavior and then on the board from 1974–1985. She was also a board member of the Journal of Human Movement Studies and Motor Skills: Theory into Action. She gave many keynote talks, including to the North American Society for the Psychology of Sport & Physical Activity in 1998, introduced by one of us (RAM). She was inducted into the National Academy of Kinesiology in 1980.
Ann Gentile was born August 28, 1936 and raised in New York City where she attended Brooklyn College, and was an accomplished player on the women's basketball team. After graduation, she became an instructor of Physical Education at Rhode Island College. In the early 1960s, she began a P.E.D. in Physical Education at Indiana University, studying motor functions of high-performance athletes and dancers. Prior to her completion of her degree, she was hired as an instructor at Teachers College in 1964. After completion in 1966, she became an Assistant Professor at Teachers College. Lawrence Locke, Professor Emeritus at University of Massachusetts, Amherst, who was on the search committee at the time, noted at her retirement celebration in 2008 “we knew we had caught a tiger by its tail.” In 1972, while remaining on the faculty, she completed a second doctorate (Ph.D.) in Neuropsychology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, simply to further her scholarly interests and expand her expertise.
Ann Gentile was a national and international leader in the study of motor skill learning and motor control who changed the way many scholars thought about the skill learning processes and variables that influenced motor control of complex, coordinated movements. In a classic paper published more than 40 years ago (and still among Quest's most cited papers in the last year) “A Working Model of Skill Acquisition with Application to Teaching” (Gentile Citation1972), Ann argued that neuromotor skills are acquired in distinct stages, with a learner's present stage having implications for teaching or treatment. In this article, she introduced many in the motor learning and control community to the work of Nicolai Bernstein, who was little known at the time by many in the field. Also, as part of this article, she described how she was disenchanted with the way motor skills were taught in Physical Education as if they were all the same. This inspired her development of “Taxonomy of Tasks”, omnipresent in many Motor Learning textbooks. The focus of the taxonomy was on physical therapists, but she argued that it was relevant for all practitioners involved in teaching motor skills. The groundbreaking part of the taxonomy was the introduction of the influence on requirements to perform skills as a result of environmental conditions. With this in mind, she grouped tasks according to the requirements and attentional demands on the performer, as well as the conditions of the environment in which the tasks are performed. For example, a person walking on flat ground can learn movement by rote practice, whereas someone walking on varied terrain must develop more flexibility to produce varying types of steps.
The implications for teaching motor skills were profound. In an interview for Teachers College Oral History project (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v = cBghODrE7So) in 2009, she elaborated on this notion. “If the task involves objects and people that don't vary, then you can set practice that way, but if a task involves motion in the environment and that motion necessarily changes from trial to trial, then practice has to be structured differently.” She pointed out that this idea met with great resistance from physical educators. “They used to start by teaching the ‘perfect movement,’ with students practicing a swing with no ball and no racquet. The problem was when you got in a game, you had one swing and the task required that you generate 25,000 different patterns, each one uniquely organized to fit the diverse environmental conditions. So my story to the physical educators was, ‘You have to put them in an open environment right from the start.’”
This concept of practicing under the conditions present during performance was carried over to her research on motor control. As an early supporter and a strong advocate for Nickolai Bernstein's theories of coordination, Ann incorporated these theories into how we should understand the control of complex coordination skills. For example, prior to the 1980's, most research on arm movement focused on motion of a single joint. Ann recognized that results from these studies provided little knowledge as to the mechanisms underlying the control of the massive number of degrees of freedom used to produce smooth, efficient movements. She was instrumental in forwarding a more global systems approach to conceptualizing and constructing research that led to an understanding of the strategies the nervous system uses to generate multi-joint reaching movements.
Ann's work was highly interdisciplinary, cutting across the fields of Physical Education, Psychology and Neuroscience. Her rather unconventional path worked to her advantage. She noted in her interview, “Here I was, a neuropsychologist working with students in applied areas, helping to start the Neuroscience & Education program, one of the early members of the Society for Neuroscience but in a niche area called Motor Learning, which involves the neurosciences and biomechanics and behavioral analysis like experimental psychology. So I wasn't in any one of those fields. I was in a field that I was instrumental in making up.”
In her early work, which would now be considered at the forefront of translational science, Ann conducted groundbreaking biomechanical analyses of movement in rats. After carefully lesioning the animals' cortices, she and her students observed the rats performing difficult tasks and recorded changes in motor behavior with high-speed film. Until then, movements were typically quantified by reaction or movement time. This painstaking work instead showed exactly how the movement was reorganized after the lesions. The work elucidated the impact of the environment on brain function and the potential for behavioral change. She was an early champion of the concept of “neuroplasticity,” where the brain can reorganize following damage, shifting functions to undamaged regions.
In an article published in 1998 in the Scandinavian Journal of Occupational Therapy (Gentile Citation1998), she elaborated her views of learning processes involved in the stages of learning. In this article, she introduced motor learning scholars to the concepts of explicit (achieving the general form of movement) and implicit (development of automaticity, without conscious awareness) learning, which had been studied by some researchers in the cognitive learning domain, but was little known or studied in the motor skills domain. This work, as well as her Taxonomy of Motor Skills, had profound implications for Neurorehabilitation. Ann applied her conceptual framework to Rehabilitation, arguing that while much early learning occurs in the implicit realm, a patient's cognitive abilities determine to a large extent what intervention approaches will be successful. Again, her message ran counter to conventional wisdom, which held that recovery was externally imposed by the therapist. “The behavior that dominates our daily lives is directed toward the accomplishment of goals. It is aimed at a specific purpose or end that we are trying to achieve. It is intentional, linked to outcomes we are attempting to produce. It has the quality of perseverance. Goal-directed behavior is guided by the consequences it produces - by feedback as to how close or how far away we are from accomplishing our objective.” (Gentile Citation2000, p112). Her message was that the teacher or therapist should not mislead the learner by telling them a form that they think will work. Instead, establish the goal, set up the regulatory stimulus conditions (environment) and let the patient problem-solve the solution based on their body constraints.
Ann's career required more than overcoming entrenched scientific views. In 1976 she was the first woman to be promoted to Full Professor in Teachers College's Division of Instruction. To overcome the biases of the peer review process, which favored men, Gentile also avoided using her first name, submitting and publishing papers as “A.M. Gentile.” She liked to tell the story of how she was once invited to an international neuroscience conference, and had put ‘“A.M.” Gentile’ next to her title for the program. She was at the opening reception when a scholar saw Gentile on her name tag, and said how he very much looked forward to meeting her eminent husband, A.M. Gentile.”
She was deeply committed to her students and to Teachers College, having served as both Department Chair and Division Director. It is important to note that Ann was a Professor at a time that, unlike now, rewarded big ideas and theoretical contributions rather than rote publication and chasing grants. Although certainly not unproductive, she was a theorist who took the time to think. She also devoted large efforts to obtaining training grants and traineeships for her students. She loved research design and statistics; in her own work, as well as when advising students, she was a perfectionist. It was not uncommon for students to work through extensive revisions over months and even years before being allowed to submit for publication, which underscores the high standards to which she held herself and her students.
Ann directly influenced many hundreds of therapists in the program to practice and develop approaches based on principles of motor learning. Her ideas remain an accepted component of virtually all curricula in Physical Rehabilitation and influence the training of new rehabilitation therapists to this day. She also influenced countless careers. Michele Basso, Professor and Director of Research at Ohio State University's School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences recalled that: “She had the highest expectations of her students and this standard of excellence pushed me to levels I didn't know were possible. She taught me to look past long streams of numerical data and ‘see’ the movement, behavior and recovery that generated the numbers. It's a skill that I try to instill in all of my PhD students.”
Howard Zelaznik, Professor in the Department of Health & Kinesiology at Purdue University and director of the department's Motor Behavior and Control Laboratory recalled: “I was a junior at Brooklyn College, majoring in psychology and physical education – and more importantly I was a varsity tennis player. Dr. Gentile visited on Tuesdays and Thursdays to teach the first motor learning course. She would come in, take off her coat, light a cigarette and start teaching. She was without a doubt the best lecturer I have ever encountered either as an undergraduate or graduate student.” “…After living in Brooklyn my entire life, I did not want to [stay in New York for graduate school], so she advised me to apply to the University of Michigan and work with an individual named Dick Schmidt. I did, and my career and new life were launched. And she remained my mentor. Ann took pride in teaching, and recognized the importance of a passionately delivered lecture to effectively convey complex topics to students. As such, Ann was a role model and mentor for over 40 years.” Ann indeed was an amazing teacher and role model for other faculty. In 2009 she received the Teachers College Medal for Distinguished Service to Education. Upon receiving the Medal at the Convocation Ceremony, she provided the newly minted doctoral students hard-earned advice: “Hold fast to the questions and issues about which you are passionate.”
One of us (AMG) was hired by Ann in 1995 to replace Joe Higgins, who co-created the program with her and had been her colleague for more than 20 years. “I was so excited to be part of a program that unlike many, really emphasized studying functional, complex movements. I remember one day as a new Assistant Professor that I was excited about a finding suggesting that children with cerebral palsy improved precision grip force control with extensive practice (far more than anyone had bothered to characterize). This was counter to everything we knew about cerebral palsy, which was thought to be a static disorder without prospect for rehabilitation. Ann looked at me with interest, put her hand on my arm, and said ‘dear, that's great, but are you going to be studying precision grip your whole life?’ This tough love was difficult, but it lead me to think about the translational aspects of the findings, eventually inspiring our successful development and implementation of new ‘motor learning’ pediatric rehabilitation protocols. This seemingly small comment changed my career trajectory, and I owe much to her (AMG).”
Ann will be sorely missed by friends, family and colleagues. Her legacy continues through her research and pedagogical contributions, the many students she influenced, and the patients who receive rehabilitation based on the motor learning principles she so passionately fostered.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Adapted in part from the memoriam developed by the Teachers College, Columbia University External Affairs Office. We thank the alumni of the Motor Learning & Control program at Teachers College (especially Virginia Overdorf), for sharing stories and providing context for memoriam. Contributions in her honor can be made at: https://www.tc.columbia.edu/campaign/what-to-support/scholarships-and-fellowships/endowed-scholarships/the-am-gentile-scholarship-fund-in-motor-learning-/
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPGY
- Gentile, A. M. (1972). A working model of skill acquisition with application to teaching, Quest, 17, 3–23.
- Gentile, A. M. (1998). Implicit and explicit processes during acquisition of functional tasks. Scandinavian Journal of Occupational Therapy, 5, 7–16.
- Gentile, A. M. (2000). Skill acquisition: Action, movement and neuromotor processes. In J.H. Carr R B. Shepherd (Eds.), Movement sciences: Foundation for physical therapy in rehabilitation. 2nd Edition (pp. 111–187). Baltimore, MD: Aspen Press.
- Gentile, A. M. (1981). A decade of research in motor learning. Academy Papers, 14, 79–88.
- Held, J., Gordon, J., & Gentile, A. M. (1985). Environmental influences on locomotor recovery following cortical lesions in rats. Journal of Behavioral Neuroscience, 99, 678–690.
- Kaminski, T., Bock, C., & Gentile, A. M. (1995). The coordination between trunk and arm motion during pointing movements. Experimental Brain Research, 106, 457–466.
- Shepherd, R. B., & Gentile, A. M. (1994). Standing up: Functional relationship between upper body and lower limb segments. Human Movement Science, 13, 817–840.