Abstract
Recent evidence supports advantages of an external focus of attention on learning motor skills, however, there is a need to retest these finding for children and comparing them with adults. Thus, the purpose of current study was to determine the effect of different attentional focus on learning a motor skill in children and adults. Thirty children (8-12 year) and thirty adults (25-42 years) were randomly assigned to one of four groups: (1) Children external focus of attention (EFA), (2) Children- internal focus of attention (IFA), (3) Adults- External focus of attention (EFA), (4) Adults- internal focus of attention (IFA). Following initial instructions and task demonstration, participants performed 60 darts throwing in six blocks and 24 hours later performed 10 additional throws for retention test. Results revealed that children benefited from EFA and IFA instruction in the same manner, however, adults benefited from EFA more than IFA instruction. Future studies should continue to examine effects of different attentional focus on other skills.
Highlights
Some level of attention is needed to learn and perform complex motor skills
Pairwise comparison using Bonferroni test revealed that Adult-internal focus of attention (IFA) group performed less efficiently than Children-external focus of attention (EFA) (p=0.002) and Adult-EFA (p
Our results revealed that there were not any significant differences between EFA and IFA instructions in children and just adult participants benefited in a different way from attentional focus instructions
Summary
Some level of attention is needed to learn and perform complex motor skills. Determining the types of attentional foci is interest area for researchers because of its influential effect on learning motor skills. "just do it" strategies (Singer, 1988) and implicit learning (Masters, 1992) have shown problematic. To resolve these problems Wulf (Wulf, 2007) offered an alternative method, that an external focus of attention (EFA) is more beneficial for the learner than an internal focus of attention (IFA). The advantage of EFA has been shown for learning balance task (Wulf, McNevin, & Shea, 2001), learning a golf pitch (Wulf, 2007; Wulf, Lauterbach, & Toole, 1999), free throw (Al-Abood, Bennett, Hernandez, Ashford, & Davids, 2002; Zachry, Wulf, Mercer, & Bezodis, 2005), dart throws (Marchant, Clough, & Crawshaw, 2007), volleyball serves and soccer passes (Wulf, McConnel, Gärtner, & Schwarz, 2002)
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