Abstract des Autors

The purpose of this study was to analyse the importance of mental information processing in acquiring motor skills (here relative to archery). Subjects were 72 secondary-school students distributed among 2 populations: 1. 32 able-bodied subjects; 2. 40 motor-handicapped subjects. In each of these 2 populations, subjects were randomly assigned to one of the 2 learning conditions: 1. referent standard conditions exclusively based on demonstration and oral comments; 2. experimental conditions which favoured mental processing by use of written and illustrated documents. In order to test the link with the complexity level of the motor task, the learning program was composed of 2 successive phases of increasing complexity. The results showed a significant superiority both in the movement quality and efficiency for the experimental subjects and so confirmed the importance of the mental information processing. They also demonstrated that this importance was linked to the level of cognitive control required by the motor task, according not only to the degree of complexity of the motor skill, but also to the possible motor difficulties of the subjects: differences between referent and experimental subjects were more significant in the second learning phase and in the motor-handicapped population. Verf.-Referat