Developmental effects influencing observational modelling: A meta-analysis

Abstract

A meta-analysis was conducted on the observational modeling (OM) literature to quantify overall between-participant treatment effects obtained when acquiring movement behaviors. To evaluate predictions of the Visual Perception theoretical perspective on OM, effects were obtained and reported separately for movement dynamics (MD) and movement outcome (MO) measures. Overall mean OM treatment effect was = 0.77 for MD, and = 0.17 for MO measures. For both measures these effects reflected a significant advantage of OM over practice-only control conditions. Importantly, the magnitude of effects obtained was far stronger for MD compared to MO measures, confirming a distinctive response to OM during motor learning. The advantage for MD measures over OM measures was replicated for different types of task. OM was particularly beneficial for serial tasks ( = MD = 1.62 and MO = 0.61). There were slightly reduced effects for continuous tasks ( = MD = 1.01 and MO = 0.51), and smaller to medium sized effects for discrete tasks ( = MD = 0.56 and MO = 0.10). These findings are in line with tenets of the Visual Perception perspective for observational modeling, which suggests demonstrations primarily convey relative motions required to approximate modeled movement behaviors.