ABSTRACT

This chapter deals with sources of variability in inter-or intraindividual performance in the execution of particular cognitive and psychomotor tasks (portions of this chapter expand on material in T.J. Smith [1993, 1998]). The chapter thus extends the analysis of movement variability in Chapter 2 to a consideration of variability in the application of different movements to carry out these types of tasks. A recurrent focus will be on context specificity as a prominent influence on variability in cognitive and psychomotor performance. Sections below expand on this theme with discussions of a historical perspective (Section 3.2), sources of variability in transfer of training and differential learning performance (Section 3.3) and in psychomotor performance (Section 3.4), and qualitative observations about task performance variability (Section 3.5).