Abstract
The study aim was to compare expert with non-expert swimmers’ rating of the aesthetic and technical qualities of front crawl in video-taped recordings of swimmers with low, middle, and high level proficiency. The results suggest that: i) observers’ experience affects their judgment: only the expert observers correctly rated the swimmers’ proficiency level; ii) evaluation of movement (technical and aesthetic scores) is correlated with the level of skill as expressed in the kinematics of the observed action (swimming speed, stroke frequency, and stroke length); iii) expert and non-expert observers use different strategies to rate the aesthetic and technical qualities of movement: equating the technical skill with the aesthetic quality is a general rule non-expert observers follow in the evaluation of human movement.
Highlights
We addressed the question of whether the technical and aesthetic evaluation of an observed action can be attributed to specific kinematic characteristics of the movement observed and whether this depends on the level of skill in the movement that an evaluator has
These equations indicate that technical and aesthetic qualities are strictly related in swimming; as compared to the expert observers (EO), the regression is closer to the identity line for the non-expert observers (NEO) and with a larger coefficient of determination
When we regressed the technical component scores as a function of the aesthetic component scores for the observer groups separately, we found that the coefficient of correlation was highly significant for the non-expert observers and that the regression was very close to the identity line
Summary
We addressed the question of whether the technical and aesthetic evaluation of an observed action can be attributed to specific kinematic characteristics of the movement observed and whether this depends on the level of skill in the movement that an evaluator has. Previous work has shown that actions become recognizable even when movements are presented as simple constellations of moving light points, underlying the human capability to “read” the kinematics of the movement observed [1] This capability was further investigated in subsequent studies in which only experts in a specific sport were able to correctly anticipate the movements of the sport observed in a video recording [2,3,4]. Different is the scenario for qualified judges since, for them, a smoothly executed, aesthetically pleasing movement will not necessarily imply a technically efficient action
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