[[alternative]]THE ROLE OF ATTENTIONAL FOCUS DIRECTION IN MOTOR LEARNING STRATEGY OF DISCRETE MOVEMENT

Abstract

[[abstract]]The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of direction within attentional focus on learning a motor task of ball throwing accuracy. By novelty principle, participants had to sit on a chair and throw balls with their non-dominant hand. Thirty university students who had no previous experience of the task were randomly assigned to one of the following three groups: (1) external direction of attentional focus group; (2) internal direction of attentional focus group; and (3) mixed direction of attentional focus group. Experimental trials included 10 trials for pretest to test the homogeneity of participants, 120 trials for acquisition, 15 trials for both 10-minute immediate retention test and one-day delay retention test. Other than radial error (RE), variable error (VE) and motor performance error rate (MPER) as dependent variables, questionnaires were administered to insight about participants’ perception during experiment. The experimental data were transformed into scores of proportion of dependent variables. Mixed Two-way ANOVA and Tukey’s HSD method were used for statistical analysis. Findings were as follows: (1) within the whole new discrete motor skill acquisition, the strategy of external direction of attentional focus was better than strategy of internal direction of attentional focus, especially for accuracy of task performance and motor performance error rate; (2) the strategy of mixed direction of attentional focus was better than strategy of internal direction of attentional focus, especially for motor performance error rate; and (3) based on the radial error, different direction of attentional focus was thought to be a learning variables, whereas based on the motor performance error rate, various direction of attentional focus was thought to be a performance variables.