Perceived Difficulty of a Motor-Skill Task as a Function of Training.

ABSTRACT A simple device called a "wire labyrinth" was used in an experiment involving learning of a two-hand motor task.,The Ss were asked, after completing each of 7 successive trails, to give their estimates of perceived (subjective) difficulty of the task.,For this purpose, the psychophysical method of magnitude estimation was used.,Time was measured as a criterion of performance.. The sevenfold repetition of the task resulted in a drop of performance time from 61 seconds to 35 seconds, i.e., by about 43%, while the perceived difficulty decreased from the initial value of 10 to 5.2, i.e., by 48%.,The course of both functions was fairly similar; the correlation coefficient of 0.96 showed a close relationship between perceied difficulty and time. It is suggested that, in the task employed, the estimation of difficulty was mainly based on the perception of time. -