THE ACQUISITION OF SKILL IN ARCHERY. 



117 



Improvement after the average of 25 inches is very slow, with the suggestion 

 of a plateau just before the quick improvement after 900 shots. Such periods 

 of no improvement occur frequently in the practice curves. In some cases it 

 has been possible to determine the cause of these with certainty. Thus one 

 subject, after witnessing a slight accident occurring to another in loosing the 

 bow, assumed, to avoid a repetition of the accident, an awkward aiming posi- 

 tion and a slow release which interfered seriously with accurate shooting. 

 The aiming position was quickly corrected, but the slow release persisted for 

 many days and kept progress almost at a standstill. In general it seems that 

 the plateaus are the result either of the accidental formation of conflicting 

 habits, or that they represent points where no improvement can be made until 

 a new method of shooting is hit upon by the method of trial and error. 



The amount of practice recorded in the experiments was not sufficient to 

 bring the skill of the subjects near the limit of improvement. The final 

 accurae.v of about 15 inches indicated in figure 17 is greater than that obtained 

 by any of the other subjects. In comparison with championship records this 

 average is still very high. The championshi]) scores at the distance of 40 

 yards made in the double American round from 1880 to 1908 vary from 312 



Fig. 17. — Improvement in long practice. 



to 412. Reduced to inches from the center of the bulls-eye, the>' are about 

 11 and 7.8 respectively. The most consistently good record available is a 

 practice score averaging about 5 inches for 90 shots. Studies of the rate of 

 improvement from 15 to 10 inches are not available, but progress is certainly 

 extremely slow. The writer, after reaching the average of 15 inches, has 

 made scarcely any progi-ess in 1 ,000 shots. The records usetl for comparison 

 extend over only the first 360 shots, and deal therefore only with the prelimi- 

 nary stages of learning. During the first 100 shots, particularly, progress is 

 made by leaps. The relation of the bow, hands, and arrow call out suddenly 

 group habits of reaction to geometrical relations; the subject, for example, 

 begins to nock the arrow at a constant place on the string and shows at once a 

 marked improvement in accuracy. Most of the coordinations of larger 

 groups of habits are formed very early in practice and probably accoimt for 

 the negative acceleration in the learning curves. 



An attempt has been made to test the effect of fatigue upon the daily im- 

 provement. All first shots for daily practice were averaged for the 5-shot 



