ABSTRACT
While our knowledge of skilled performance has been advanced on many fronts through the study of tracking performance, and while there is much interest in tracking per se from the perspective of man-machine system design, the ultimate goal of much research on perceptual-motor skills concerns the understanding of the acquisition and performance of so-called voluntary movements. The chapter describes the performance of a subject in a simple tracking task in which the signal to be followed is essentially unpredictable. Under these conditions we know enough to formulate rather detailed models or specifications for what mechanisms or processes are needed to produce performance equivalent to that of our human subject, and these models involve very little “intelligence.” Finally, the full richness of human skilled performance depends on capacities not captured by strict stimulus-bound representations derived largely from the study of tracking tasks.
