Abstract
An experiment was carried out to study the nature of end-spurt in a task requiring pure muscular activity (tapping a telegraph key) and to compare the findings to those which studied end-spurt in tasks requiring other types of activities. Here, as was found in other tasks, significant end-spurt occurred when Ss believed they were 90% completed. However, in contrast to other tasks, performance improved on the critical trial for all conditions. This was interpreted as being due to arousal resulting from onset of a signal light rather than to any significance the light might have had. It was proposed that a variable influencing end-spurt might be the length of time spent at a task. It was also pointed out that in this type of task the amount of recovery from decrement which occurs through end-spurt is only a small portion of the total decrement which has previously occurred. Optimization of performance level could probably best be achieved through distributed work periods where rest would be introduced prior to the occurrence of decrement.
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