Foreword / Leon J. Whitsell -- Preface -- Perceptual-Motor Behavior and Education -- Movement and the Human Personality -- Movement and the Intellect -- A Three-level Theory of Perceptual-Motor Behavior -- Some Social Dimensions of Physical Activity: Recent Trends in the Literature -- The Complexity of People -- The Independence and Interdependence of Visual Perception and Movement in Infants and Children -- Research Guidelines -- Research in Human Movement -- New Perspectives Upon Man in Action -- Movement Activities in General Education -- The Use and Misuse of Movement in Education -- Ego Growth and Movement Efficiency -- The Gender Identification of Children -- Personality in Movement -- Why Johnny Can't Right ... Write ... -- Special Education -- General Considerations -- Kinesiology and Special Education -- On the Threshold -- We Learn of Vision from the Sightless, and the Retarded Teach us About Cognition -- Blind Children and Youth -- The Development of Perceptual-Motor Abilities in Blind Children and Youth -- Mobility Research at UCLA -- A Summary and Implications of the Findings -- The Educability of Dynamic Spatial Orientations in Blind Children -- The Clumsy Child Syndrome -- Principles of Perceptual-Motor Training for Children with Minimal Neurology Handicaps -- Hyperactivity and Education for Purposeful Behavior -- The Mentally Retarded -- The Role of Motor Activities in Programs for Mentally Retarded Children -- Some Perceptual-Motor Characteristics of Children and Youth with Downs Syndrome -- The Orthopedically Handicapped -- The Use of Perceptual-Motor Activities for Orthopedically Handicapped Children -- Screening Test for Evaluating the Perceptual-Motor Attributes of Neurologically Handicapped and Retarded Children -- A Mobility Orientation Test for the Blind.

Improvements in task performance following practice can occur as a result of changes in distinct cognitive and neural processes. In some cases, we can improve our performance by selecting a more successful behavior that is already part of our available repertoire. Skill learning, on the other hand, refers to a slower process that results in improving the ability to perform a behavior, i.e., it involves the acquisition of a behavior that was not available to the controller before training. Skill learning can take place both in the sensory and in the motor domains. Sensory skill acquisition in perceptual learning tasks is measured by improvements in sensory acuity through practice-induced changes in the sensitivity of relevant neural networks. Motor skill is harder to define as the term is used whenever a motor learning behavior improves along some dimension. Nevertheless, we have recently argued that as in perceptual learning, acuity is an integral component in motor skill learning. In this special topic we set out to integrate experimental and theoretical work on perceptual and motor skill learning and to stimulate a discussion regarding the similarities and differences between these two kinds of learning.