In Memoriam: Antoinette M. Gentile (1936 – 2016)

On February 7, 2016, our profession lost one of the true visionaries of our field. Antoinette M. Gentile, Professor Emerita at Teachers College, Columbia University, passed away at the age of 79. She had spent 44 years at Teachers College on the faculties of Movement Science and Psychology and was a leader in movement science and neuromotor research. 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 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. She was an Associate Editor at the Journal of Motor Behavior and then served 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, which provided a new approach to the field of Kinesiology in 1998. She was inducted into to The National Academy of Kinesiology in 1980.

Dr. A.M. Gentile, an exceptional mind

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 a living history interview for TC, Columbia, “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!”

She was the recipient of two PhDs: one was in Physical Education/Kinesiology from Indiana University, where she studied motor functions of high-performance athletes and dancers under the guidance of Dr. Arthur Slater-Hammel; the other PhD was in Neuropsychology at the SUNY Stony Brook. Her last year in residence at Indiana, she could be found at any hour of the night in her dorm room studying. She had just switched to the Psychology doctoral program and believed that “C students went to bed at midnight, B students at 2 AM and A students were up all night.” You can imagine that Ann fell into the all night category!

Ann’s roots were conventional, but her ideas were avant-garde

What many don’t know about Ann Gentile is that she was a very gifted athlete, as well. While organized collegiate sports for women were not yet on the radar, Ann ran track and played basketball in the Police Athletic League and other community leagues with her good friend, Lucille Kyvallos (former Queens College basketball coach). Ann told me that she and Louise played basketball almost every night while she was a student at Brooklyn College. Yet it was when a coach attempted to teach her the game of tennis that a light bulb went on about how neuromotor skills are taught. The coach had her stand in one place on the court while he fed ball after ball to her. When she played in a game, she was great whenever the ball went into that one spot – but that’s not what happens in tennis. There are multiple swings that must be made, not just one perfect swing. Ann’s response to that situation was “if a task involves motion in the environment and that motion necessarily changes from trial-to-trial, then practice needs to be structured differently.” This experience started her on her way to becoming a national and international leader in the study of motor skills learning and motor control that changed the way many scholars thought about the skill learning processes and variables that influenced motor control of complex, coordinated physical activity.

It was in this journal, Quest, that she published, in 1972, what became a classic paper in the field. More than 40 years ago (and still among Quest’s most cited papers in the last year), she published “A Working Model of Skill Acquisition with Application to Teaching” (Gentile, 1972). 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 realization inspired her development of “Taxonomy of Tasks,” omnipresent in many Motor Learning textbooks. The focus of the original 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 playing tennis must develop more flexibility to produce varying types of shots.

The 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 Bernstein’s theories of coordination, Dr. Gentile incorporated the theories into how we should understand the control of complex coordination skills. For example, prior to the 1980s, 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.

In an article published in 1998 in the Scandinavian Journal of Occupational Therapy (Gentile 1998), 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 2000, 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 student or patient problem-solve the solution based on their body constraints.

A truly gifted teacher

Ann’s students held her in the highest regard. She was a gifted teacher, able to take very complicated principles and make them understandable by all. She was a wonderful inspiration to her students. I can remember driving home from Columbia to my home, so wrapped up in thoughts and ideas, that I didn’t realize where I was until I pulled into my driveway! We thought she was a true visionary and scholar. She held us to the highest standards, not able to even consider a dissertation until we had completed at least two publishable research studies. This standard of excellence was clearly the one she also held for herself. She loved research design and statistics. She instilled that same love in all of us, along with a great understanding of the research process that guided our professional careers. She further instilled attention to detail in both research and writing; a strong sense of professional ethics; and dedication to excellence. We all will miss you, Ann, but you will live on in our memories as well as in the many contributions that your forward thinking gave to the professions of Kinesiology/Motor Learning and Control, and Physical and Occupational Therapy. You were truly an impressive person.

Written by Virginia Overdorf, and adapted in part from the memoriam developed by the Teachers College, Columbia University External Affairs Office and input from former alumni of the Motor Learning and Control Program (especially Klaus Nemetz and Bonnie Berger) as well as Ann’s colleagues in the motor learning program (especially Dr. Andy Gordon).

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-/