Salmoni A W, McIlwain J S
Percept Mot Skills. 1979 Oct;49(2):403-13. doi: 10.2466/pms.1979.49.2.403.
Employing Fitts' reciprocal tapping task, the capacity of the motor system in bits processed/second was assessed across different ages. In Exp. I a comparison was made among Grades 1, 5, 9, and university females. Motor capacity and average movement time/tap were significantly lower for Grade 1 girls than the other three grades. In addition, within-subject variability and percentage error rate decreased with increasing grade level. These findings were discussed in comparison to other studies looking at motor capacity changes across ages. Exp. II was designed to study the changes in motor capacity throughout 25 days of practice by two 5-yr.-old children. Two different methods were used to calculate motor capacity. One method (Kay, 1962) which assessed motor capacity separately for each tapping condition led to the conclusion that capacity increased with practice. A second method (Fitts & Peterson, 1964) treating all tapping conditions together in a regression equation and measuring capacity as the reciprocal of the slope (1/b) showed capacity to decrease with practice for one subject and oscillate with practice for the other subject. The general conclusion drawn from the two experiments was that motor capacity, as assessed by Fitts' tapping task, is not an extremely useful measure. Consideration of movement time is usually just as informative.
采用菲茨的对指敲击任务，评估了不同年龄段运动系统每秒处理的信息量。在实验一中，对一年级、五年级、九年级的女生以及大学女生进行了比较。一年级女生的运动能力和平均每次敲击的运动时间显著低于其他三个年级。此外，受试者内部的变异性和错误率百分比随着年级的升高而降低。将这些研究结果与其他关于不同年龄段运动能力变化的研究进行了比较和讨论。实验二旨在研究两名5岁儿童在25天的练习过程中运动能力的变化。使用了两种不同的方法来计算运动能力。一种方法（凯，1962年）分别针对每种敲击条件评估运动能力，得出能力随着练习而提高的结论。第二种方法（菲茨和彼得森，1964年）在回归方程中将所有敲击条件综合考虑，并将能力测量为斜率的倒数（1/b），结果显示一名受试者的能力随着练习而下降，另一名受试者的能力则随着练习而波动。从这两个实验得出的总体结论是，通过菲茨敲击任务评估的运动能力并不是一个非常有用的指标。对运动时间的考量通常同样具有参考价值。
