The effect of self-awareness on the ability to recognize personal motion

The purpose of this study was to examine the abilities of athletes with specific gait training (i.e., runners) discriminating personal gait from point-light videos were compared to athletes for whom gait is not a trained aspect of the sport (i.e., swimmers), and that of a control. It was hypothesized that runners would discriminate their gait among different individuals with greater accuracy than the other two groups and that runners would also devote more attention to the lower extremities for recognition indications. Results showed that runners group recognized themselves more often than the other two groups (p = .048, η 2 = 0.18), and that runners allotted more visual attention to the lower extremities (p < .05, ηp 2 = 0.16) when viewing the point-light videos than the other groups. The findings were consistent with other investigations with point-light video representations of movement and suggest that experience and training lead to movement self-awareness that is both recognizable and accessible by a performer.The project was supported by a grant from the Research Council at Western Illinois University for the purchase of the Gazepoint eye tracking equipment

Transfer of Motor Skills: A Comparative Study of College-Level Musicians and Athletes

Background:  The transfer of motor skills is one of the central topics in motor behavior and speaks to the effects of learned motor skills on learning or performing other skills. The purpose of this investigation was to examine the transfer of skillful fine or moderately-fine movements to novel tasks requiring similar movements.  Methods: The study involved 43 undergraduate university students in three groups: university musicians, athletes, and a control cohort.  Two novel motor tasks were performed that required either fine hand movements (pursuit rotor task), or moderately-fine arm movements (underhand dart throw task). Results: For the fine motor task, musicians performed better than the athletes and the control (p0.05).  For the moderately-fine task, the athletes performed better than the other two groups (p<0.05), and in particular, with the dominant arm (p<0.05), as hypothesized. Conclusion: A lack of shared elements between musical instrument playing skills and the novel fine motor task likely contributed to the relatively low levels of performance with the musicians.  Conversely, the presence of more shared elements between sports throwing skills and the novel moderately-fine task likely contributed to greater levels of performance by the athletes