Motor Development and Learning
Mehdi Babak; Hasan Mohammadzadeh; Masahiro Yamada
Abstract
Introduction: External attentional focus has been shown to enhance motor performance compared to internal attentional focus. Recently, studies have suggested that this effect may depend on the type of task-relevant instructions provided. The present study aimed to compare the effects of task-relevant ...
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Introduction: External attentional focus has been shown to enhance motor performance compared to internal attentional focus. Recently, studies have suggested that this effect may depend on the type of task-relevant instructions provided. The present study aimed to compare the effects of task-relevant attentional focus instructions on dart-throwing skill performance.
Methods: This study employed a pretest, retention, and transfer test design. A total of 114 male high school students were randomly assigned to three groups (n = 38 each): external focus, form/technique external focus, and form/technique internal focus. On the first day, all participants completed 27 practice throws followed by a pretest. Over three training sessions (108 throws per session), the participants practiced under their assigned attentional focus instructions. Retention and transfer tests were conducted 24 hours after the final session. Data were analyzed using repeated-measures ANOVA, one-way ANOVA, and Tukey's post-hoc test.
Results: The results indicated significant differences across the pretest, retention, and transfer phases in all three groups. In the form/technique external focus group, a significant improvement was observed from the pretest to the retention test, but not from the pretest to the transfer test. When comparing transfer scores among the three groups, the form/technique internal focus group outperformed both other groups (p < 0.05).
Conclusion: Based on the findings, form/technique instructions with an internal attentional focus may be beneficial for improving motor skill performance; however, confirming these results requires further research.
Ebrahim Abbasi; Rasol Yaali; Farhad Ghadiri
Abstract
When an athlete takes maximum advantage of his released degrees of freedom, he is called a motor elite. The aim of this study was to investigate the eliteness by combining speed constraint and explicit, errorless and analogical inference constraints. 21 physical education students (three of them were ...
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When an athlete takes maximum advantage of his released degrees of freedom, he is called a motor elite. The aim of this study was to investigate the eliteness by combining speed constraint and explicit, errorless and analogical inference constraints. 21 physical education students (three of them were excluded from this study: 21-3=18) from Kharazmi University voluntarily participated in this study. The participants in three distinct groups (explicit, errorless and analogical inference) participated in four sessions; each season consisted of 20 blocks and each block 6 attempts so eventually they had 480 repetitions in dart throe skill. One-way ANOVA, Kruskal-Wallis, paired t test and Wilcoxon test were used to investigate the significance of the hypotheses. The results showed that implicit learning emerged as a result of the combination of the speed constraint and the constraints of all three methods (P≤0.05). Adding speed constraint to other training methods (explicit, errorless and analogical inference) makes them implicit and changes the order of the system in errorless method and increases errors. However, for a certain conclusion, subsequent studies are better using muscle activity registration to consider degrees of freedom as a criterion of eliteness. These results can help skill learners, instructors and especially physical education teachers to adopt efficient teaching methods given their time limits.
Niloofar Jafari Gandomani; Rasool Abedanzadeh; Esmaeel Saemi
Abstract
The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of active video games on the learning of dart throwing skill in children with autism spectrum disorder. In this semi-experimental study, 30 children with autism spectrum disorder (level 1) in Ahvaz city were purposively selected and randomly assigned ...
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The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of active video games on the learning of dart throwing skill in children with autism spectrum disorder. In this semi-experimental study, 30 children with autism spectrum disorder (level 1) in Ahvaz city were purposively selected and randomly assigned to three equal groups (real practice, virtual practice, and control). Firstly, the dart throwing pretest was performed with 10 real trials. Then, the practice groups practiced for 4 sessions during 2 weeks and 30 trials (3 blocks of 10 trials) per session in the acquisition stage. After the last acquisition session, the posttest was performed by 10 trials and retention test was performed after 24 hours. Finally, the transfer test was performed with the counterbalance manner in both environments for all three groups 30 minutes after the retention test. Data were analyzed by mix analysis of variance and post hoc tests at P≤0.05 using SPSS22 software. The results showed a significant difference between the two practice groups in the acquisition stage (P≤0.01) and the virtual group had better performance than the real group. Also, the results indicated that real and virtual groups had better performance than the control group in the retention and transfer tests, and the virtual group had better progress than the real group in the mean scores of dart throwing. In general, the results showed that active video games improved performance and learning of dart throwing in children with autism spectrum disorder.
