Does self-efficacy mediate transfer effects in the learning of easy and difficult motor skills? David Stevens a,⇑ , David I. Anderson b , Nicholas J. O’Dwyer a , A. Mark Williams c a Discipline of Exercise and Sport Science, The University of Sydney, Australia b Department of Kinesiology, San Francisco State University, United States c School of Sport and Exercise Sciences, Liverpool John Moores University, United Kingdom article info Article history: Received 3 September 2011 Available online 21 April 2012 Keywords: Balance Confidence Motor learning Motor performance Motor skill Self-efficacy abstract The effect of task difficulty on inter-task transfer is a classic issue in motor learning. We examined the relation between self-efficacy and transfer of learning after practicing differ- ent versions of a stick balancing task. Practicing the same task or an easier version led to significant pre- to post-test transfer of learning, whereas practicing a more difficult version did not. Self-efficacy increased modestly from pre- to post-test with easy practice, but decreased significantly with difficult practice. In addition, self-efficacy immediately prior to the post-test was significantly lower after difficult practice than easy or intermediate practice. Self-efficacy immediately prior to the post-test, performance at the end of prac- tice, and pre-test performance explained 75% of the variance in post-test performance. The mediating role of self-efficacy on transfer of learning offers an alternative explanation for recent findings on the superiority of easy-to-difficult transfer and may help clarify inconsistencies in earlier research. Ó 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction As a child of Experimental Psychology, the field of Motor Control and Learning has had a longstanding interest in the cog- nitive conscious processes associated with the execution and acquisition of skills (Schmidt & Lee, 2011). Fitts and Posner’s (1967) pioneering suggestion of a shift from controlled cognitive processing during the early stages of skill acquisition to more automatic processing in the later stages has perhaps generated the greatest interest in understanding what role cog- nition plays in motor behavior. This interest has expressed itself more recently in discussions about the contributions of im- plicit versus explicit conscious processing to the transfer of learning across tasks that vary in difficulty (e.g., Masters, Maxwell, & Poolton, 2008; Poolton, Masters, & Maxwell, 2007). Transfer of skill across tasks that vary in difficulty is a classic issue in motor learning (Schmidt & Young, 1987). Early re- views of research on direction of transfer effects yielded inconsistent conclusions about the superiority of one direction of transfer versus the other. Day (1956) concluded that easy-to-difficult transfer of learning was superior when the difficulty of discriminating task-relevant stimuli was manipulated, whereas difficult-to-easy transfer was superior when the difficulty of producing the response was manipulated. Holding (1962) argued that difficult-to-easy transfer was superior for most tasks; though, ironically, he also found evidence for easy-to-difficult transfer. Finally, Singer (1966) maintained that practi- tioners generally assume that easy-to-difficult transfer is superior even though he found no evidence for one direction of transfer being superior to another in an archery shooting task. 1053-8100/$ - see front matter Ó 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2012.03.014 ⇑ Corresponding author. Address: Discipline of Exercise and Sport Science, The University of Sydney, Faculty of Health Sciences, Cumberland Campus C42, PO Box 170, Lidcombe, NSW 1825, Australia. Fax: +61 9351 9204. E-mail address: david.stevens@sydney.edu.au (D. Stevens). Consciousness and Cognition 21 (2012) 1122–1128 Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect Consciousness and Cognition journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/concog