Two experiments were conducted to examine the hypothesis that learning by analogy will invoke characteristics of an implicit mode of motor learning. In the first experiment, table tennis novices learned to hit forehand topspin implicitly, explicitly or by analogy. The results showed that the analogy and implicit learning groups accumulated equivalently fewer explicit rules than the explicit learning group during the learning phase. When a concurrent secondary task was added, the explicit learning group suffered from a significantly more serious performance impairment than the analogy and implicit learning groups; no significant differences were seen between the latter two groups. Self-perceived performance was correlated to actual performance in the explicit learning group but not in the analogy or the implicit learning groups. In the second experiment, the performance of an explicit learning group was found to be impaired by both a stress intervention and a thought suppression intervention, whereas the performance of an analogy learning group was not. These characteristics of analogy learning parallel those reported in the implicit learning literature, suggesting that analogy learning may be an effective method for teaching skills implicitly in sport.

Although it has often been implied that self-focused attention plays a mediating role in performance degradation under stress, the assumption that stress will evoke self-focus has received limited empirical support. Two studies were carried out to explore this relationship. The first study, using a time-to-event paradigm, showed that a higher level of self-focused attention accompanied increased anxiety levels in the buildup to competition. In the second study, basketball novices who were instructed to focus on the mechanics of the ball-shooting process during practice suffered a significant performance decrement in a subsequent stressful test phase, whereas those who were required only to do their best during practice showed no degradation in performance. It was concluded that self-focused attention may increase in response to psychological stress, and that the negative effect of self-focused attention on performance under stress is likely to be magnified by learning the skill under a high degree of self-focused attention, which can result in an overawareness of the performance process.

No abstract

No abstract

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of impairment type, child's gender, and parent's gender on parent's motives for letting their children with various impairments participate in physical activity. Participants were 184 Taiwanese parents (n=78 fathers, n=106 mothers) of elementary school age children with impairments. Parents' motives were assessed using the revised Exercise Participation Motives (EPM) scale (Wu & Liao, 2011). Parents rated personal fitness and skill improvement, positive emotion and friendship, and teamwork as the top three reasons for their child's participation in physical activity. Differences in parents' motives by impairment and child's gender were not statistically significant. A significant effect of parent's gender on parents' motives was found only for the social enhancement construct on the EPM. The cross cultural similarity of the findings and impact of the results in regard to program planning and implementation for children with impairments and their families are discussed.