The Effectiveness of Autonomy Support and Enhancing Expediencies on Motor Learning in the Elderly Women

Improving motor performance in elderly and distinguishing their condition to retrain skills is one of the challenges that any community faces. Therefore, the present study aimed to investigate the effect of autonomy support and enhancing expectancies on motor learning in elderly women. It was a semi-experimental study was including pretest and posttest design with retention test.  40 women were selected among all elderly women in Andimeshk according to inclusion criteria and availability, with the age range of 60 to 80. Samples were randomly divided into four groups as autonomy support, enhancing expectancies, autonomy support and enhancing expectancies, and control. Participants were required to throw bags (100 g) with their non-dominant arm at a specific target on the ground. After five throws as a pretest, all participants performed 6 phases of 10 trials in the acquisition phase. 24 hours after the acquisition stage, participants attended retention test (with 10 trials) to check learning effects on them. To analyzing data, one way and multiple variance analyses were conducted using SPSS16 at significance level P≤0.05. The results showed that in acquisition and training phases, all groups significantly increased their accuracy (P≤0.05), though difference among groups was not meaningful (P≥0.05). Also, results detected better performance of autonomy support and enhancing expectancies group in retention phase (P≤0.05). Therefore, motor therapists, coaches, and all those associated with the elderly were suggested to use influencing factors to improve elders learning and motor performance.