In Memoriam: Antoinette M. Gentile (1936 – 2016)

Antoinette (Ann) Gentile, Professor Emerita at Teachers College, Columbia University passed away at the age of 79 on February 7, 2016. She spent 44 years at Teachers College on the faculties of Movement Science and Psychology and was a leader in movement science and neuromotor research. She was a pioneer in applying theories of brain function to the treatment of individuals who had experienced strokes or neurological conditions, ushering in a new era in rehabilitation. Along with her colleagues, Ann established the first interdisciplinary graduate program in Motor Learning at Teachers College. Many graduates became leaders in Kinesiology, Physical Education and Rehabilitation (Physical and Occupational Therapy). She was an Associate Editor at the Journal of Motor Behavior and then on the board from 1974–1985. She was also a board member of the Journal of Human Movement Studies and Motor Skills: Theory into Action. She gave many keynote talks, including to the North American Society for the Psychology of Sport & Physical Activity in 1998, introduced by one of us (RAM). She was inducted into the National Academy of Kinesiology in 1980. Ann Gentile was born August 28, 1936 and raised in New York City where she attended Brooklyn College, and was an accomplished player on the women’s basketball team. After graduation, she became an instructor of Physical Education at Rhode Island College. In the early 1960s, she began a P.E. D. in Physical Education at Indiana University, studying motor functions of high-performance athletes and dancers. Prior to her completion of her degree, she was hired as an instructor at Teachers College in 1964. After completion in 1966, she became an Assistant Professor at Teachers College. Lawrence Locke, Professor Emeritus at University of Massachusetts, Amherst, who was on the search committee at the time, noted at her retirement celebration in 2008 “we knew we had caught a tiger by its tail. ” In 1972, while remaining on the faculty, she completed a second doctorate (Ph.D.) in Neuropsychology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, simply to further her scholarly interests and expand her expertise. Ann Gentile was a national and international leader in the study of motor skill learning and motor control who changed the way many scholars thought about the skill learning processes and variables that influenced motor control of complex, coordinated movements. In a classic paper published more than 40 years ago (and still among Quest’s most cited papers in the last year) “A Working Model of Skill Acquisition with Application to Teaching” (Gentile 1972), Ann argued that neuromotor skills are acquired in distinct stages, with a learner’s present stage having implications for teaching or treatment. In this article, she introduced many in the motor learning and control community to the work of Nicolai Bernstein, who was little known at the time by many in the field. Also, as part of this article, she described how she was disenchanted with the way motor skills were taught in Physical Education as if they were all the same. This inspired her development of “Taxonomy of Tasks”, omnipresent in many Motor Learning textbooks. The focus of the taxonomy was on physical therapists, but she argued that it was relevant for all practitioners involved in teaching motor skills. The groundbreaking part of the taxonomy was the introduction of the influence on requirements to perform skills as a result of environmental conditions. With this in mind, she grouped tasks according to the requirements and attentional demands on the performer, as well as the conditions of the environment in which the tasks are performed. For example, a person walking on flat ground can learn movement by rote practice, whereas someone walking on varied terrain must develop more flexibility to produce varying types of steps. The implications for teaching motor skills were profound. In an interview for Teachers College Oral History project (https://www.youtube.com/watch? v D cBghO DrE7So) in 2009, she elaborated on this notion. “If the task involves objects and people that don’t vary, then you can set practice that way, but if a task involves motion in the environment and that motion necessarily changes from trial to trial, then practice has to be structured differently. ” She pointed out that this idea met with great resistance from physical educators. “They used to start by teaching the ‘perfect movement,’ with students practicing a swing with no ball and no racquet. The problem was when you got in a game, you had one swing and the task required that you generate 25,000 different patterns, each one uniquely organized to fit the diverse environmental conditions. So my story to the physical educators was, ‘You have to put them in an open environment right from the start. ’”