In most sports, the development of elite athletes is a long-term process of talent identification and support. Typically, talent selection systems administer a multi-faceted strategy including national coach observations and varying physical and psychological tests when deciding who is chosen for talent development. The aim of this exploratory study was to evaluate the prognostic validity of talent selections by varying groups 10 years after they had been conducted.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThere is little research investigating the maintenance of perceptual-cognitive expertise in general and even less comparing coaches of different ages. The aim of this study was to test for perceptual-cognitive differences between age groups, licence levels, and their interaction. This study investigated differences in skilled performance between young and middle-aged coaches of three different skill levels.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: The quiet eye (final fixation to a specific target prior to movement initiation) is a perceptual skill robustly associated with expertise and superior performance. The benefit of the phenomenon has been demonstrated in a range of sporting tasks. The mechanism(s) underpinning this phenomenon are much-debated and are associated with varying assumptions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThere is mounting research to suggest that cognitive and motor expertise is more resistant to age-related decline than more general capacities. The authors investigated the retention of skills in medium-aged skilled (n = 14) and older-aged skilled (n = 7) athletes by comparing them with medium-aged less skilled (n = 15) and older-aged less skilled (n = 15) participants. Participants performed basketball free throws and dart throws as a transfer task under standardized conditions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe quiet eye is a perceptual skill associated with expertise and superior performance; however, little is known about the transfer of quiet eye across domains. We attempted to replicate previous skill-based differences in quiet eye and investigated whether transfer of motor and perceptual skills occurs between similar tasks. Throwing accuracy and quiet eye duration for skilled and less-skilled basketball players were examined in basketball free throw shooting and the transfer task of dart throwing.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAppl Psychophysiol Biofeedback
September 2013
The importance of perceptual-cognitive expertise in sport has been repeatedly demonstrated. In this study we examined the role of different sources of visual information (i.e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFOne characteristic of perceptual expertise in sport and other domains is known as 'the quiet eye', which assumes that fixated information is processed during gaze stability and insufficient spatial information leads to a decrease in performance. The aims of this study were a) replicating inter- and intra-group variability and b) investigating the extent to which quiet eye supports information pick-up of varying fields of vision (i.e.
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