The purpose of the present study was to examine the effectiveness of the implicit strategy, which dares not explain the content of a new task to be learned. We evaluated whether this implicit strategy would not interfere with a task performance that have already been learned.
Twenty young adults were assigned to an explicit strategy group (EG; n = 11), and an implicit strategy group (IG; n = 11). All participants were required to move a cursor from starting position to the target. The cursor was rotated to 0° (i.e., not manipulated by researcher: 0° condition), 60° (i.e., 60° condition), or 80° (i.e., 80° condition) in the clockwise direction from the actual mouse movement. We calculated the error angle between the direction of the target and the direction the cursor moved. We then used this error angle as a task performance. The present study consisted of a training phase and an evaluation phase. In the training phase, all participants performed 20 trials in the 0° condition, followed by 100 trials in the 60° condition. All participants then performed 100 trials in 80° condition. At this time, EG was informed that the rotation angle would change to 80°. On the other hand, IG was falsely informed that the rotation angle would remain at 60°. To evaluate the effect of the training phase, task performances of the 60° and 80° conditions were assessed 40 times in the evaluation phase.
All participants in the IG did not notice that the rotation angle changed to 80° in the training phase. In the evaluation phase, in the first trial of the 60° condition, the error angle was significantly larger for the EG than for the IG (independent t-test: p = 0.029). On the other hand, there was no difference in error angle between EG and IG in the first trial of the 80° condition (independent t-test: p = 0.626).
The implicit strategy was effective for preventing the transient deterioration in a performance of a practiced task.
We routinely give patients an adequate explanation of the intervention. However, the present study suggested that we may be able to start the subsequent intervention smoothly by daring to simplify the explanation. Our findings may assist in the development of safe physical therapy.
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