The latest in skill acquisition and performance research from perceptonaction.com

-An often overlooked aspect of skilled performance is the intersectionality between gender and motor learning. One way in which this manifests itself is stereotype threat which occurs when a common stereotype like “girls are bad at math” or “men don’t putt as well” impairs learning. if you are interested, I discussed this in detail in episode 37B of the Perception & Action Podcast. In a new article in the journal Gender & Education, Larsson and colleagues investigate another example of this – gender norms. That it, whether a skill is quote unquote a boy or a girl thing. In their paper they looked at learning to juggle and found gender differences related to norms. Specifically, controlling objects space was more boy-like and persistently practicing to improve was girl-like. I think this definitely an important aspect of skill acquisition that needs to be explored – our social and cultural environment serve as important constraints for learning that need to be understand and changed when necessary.

-How do teammates in sports learn to coordinate their actions and be on the same page? In a paper recently published in the Journal of Sport Psychology in Action, Malone and Lorimer looked at the importance of shared understanding in team sports like soccer and consider how it can be developed in practice. While this is very interesting, I was somewhat disappointed that the authors essentially ignored the ecological account of how team coordination occurs. Shared understanding relies on shared mental models – players have the same knowledge about what to do in certain situations and use this to act. An alternative is that players have shared affordances. That is, instead of stored knowledge, players are attuned to and pick the same information from the environment and perceive the same opportunities for action. Some of the studies they actually cite in the paper are really giving evidence for shared affordances not shared understanding – so I think it’s important to differentiate between the two.  

-Finally today, as I discussed on Monday’s news, an exciting new trend in research is the ability to take recording technologies out into the real world! Another example of this can be seen in a study just published in the Nature Scientific Reports by Lima and colleagues. In it, the eye movements, EEG brain activity and hand and foot movements were record for an elite, Formula E driver, driving a real car on the Top Gear race track under high speed, wet track conditions.  Interestingly, they found that the alpha and beta frequency from the EEG correlated with the hand and foot movements while driving. And that the gaze and EEG activity were predictive of when a difficult part of the track was coming up. This is quite impressive given that it is typically very difficult to get any meaningful EEG data when a person is moving around a lot. It creates exciting opportunities for assessing skill at different functional levels of analysis. I know what’s on my Christmas list!

-That’s the latest from the world of skill acquisition. Find links to the articles I mentioned today on my blog page and learn much more by subscribing to the Perception & Action Podcast at perceptionaction.com. Have a great day and keep ‘em coupled.

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