Information in learning to co-ordinate and control movements: Is there a need for specificity of practice?

The goal of the paper is to defend the thesis that information and movement are tightly coupled and as a result specificity of training is required in order to get meaningful learning effects. This thesis will be illustrated by elaborating upon the role of informational constraints in the control and learning of one-handed catching. For instance, it is shown how learning to catch is influenced by the manipulation of various visual constraints related to predictive temporal and spatial information. In order to explain the many, and sometimes contradictory, experimental findings, different phases in the learning of information-movement coupling are proposed as being analogous to Bernstein's idea about the mastering of degrees of freedom. Further, we argue that sport psychology, and in particular motor learning, can benefit conceptually and experimentally from this framework.