STREAKS IN SKILLED PERFORMANCE

Experiments in golf putting and darts demonstrated that skilled perfor mance is streaky. The tendency for outcome sequences to form streaks w as greatest when the task difficulty was such that about half the tria ls were successful. Mixtures of the two activities were also streaky, even when periodic interruption made the individual components resembl e a random Bernoulli process. Formal models of sequence structure reve aled that waves in hit rate are associated with the appearance of stre aks.