Seventy percent of kids drop out of sports before their high school graduation. Only 15% leave because they feel they are not good enough. Almost 70% leave because they were not having fun, or due to problems with the coach. Injuries cause 30% to give up sports. This course is packed full of practical sports science information that provide youth coaches and parents with the practical pediatric sports science insights to successfully retain young athletes and develop their sport potential while avoiding injury and overtraining. We begin by examining the multidimensional nature of coaching, the relevant sport motor performance abilities, the impact of growth and development on motor skills, the gene versus practice controversy, and briefly overview the body structures strengthened through training. Then we explore the athlete's energy supply, where this energy comes from, and how it matures along with the athlete. Finally, we examine the development of strength, power, anaerobic capacity, coordination and flexibility through the life span. The optional text manual for this course is available at: http://www.learnitez.com/HighPerformanceScience/manuals/
Psychology 3 - Perceptual and Cognitive Expertise (Dr. Mark Williams)
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来自 University of Florida 的课程
The Science of Training Young Athletes
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从本节课中
Week 5: Enhancing the fluidity of movement
Coordination and flexibility permit movements that are precise, fluid and spatially controlled. In this section we examine current knowledge about coordination and flexibility as the young child moves through early childhood and into adolescence.
与讲师见面
Dr. Chris BrooksInstructor
Coaching Science Coordinator for USA Track and Field
So welcome back.
That brings us to our third segment in our interview with Dr.
Mark Williams who has been kind enough to join us and answer a lot of questions
about the development of expertise, talent identification, and talent development.
The third segment of our question and answer session deals with, specifically,
the development of perceptual and cognitive expertise, which I know is your
primary area of expertise, Mark, to use a pun intentionally.
But one of the broad goals of the study of
expertise is to identify, what are the differences between expert and novices?
That has been a goal of experts in
this field who study expertise across a wide range of domains.
And I think ultimately, the intention is to identify those differences with
the ultimate purpose of being able to come up with training programs that would help
train novices or those of lesser expertise levels
to behave in ways that are more like experts, and one of the primary
areas of focus in your work has been on the development of perceptual skills.
And so could you begin by just commenting on
the trainability of perceptual skills and the overall effectiveness of
using perceptual skills training programs, which I know you've done a lot of work in,
and there's a growing body of literature in this area.
>> The development of perceptual cognitive skills, and anticipation and
decision-making skills, we know it starts very early.
We know for instance that in soccer as an example, eight-year-old elite players can
be differentiated from their eight-year-old sub-elite counterparts
based on their performance on standardized measures of anticipation and
decision-making skill.
We also know that there is a strong relationship between the accumulation
of practice within the particular sport and
the development of these game intelligence skills.
So the development of these skills are largely sport-specific.
In other words, you engage in the sport, and you develop knowledge structures
through practice and much play experience that allows you to be
able to more effectively process the information within the environment.
We also know there's a fairly substantive body of research work now in sport and
across other domains that suggest that we can develop
interventions that facilitate a more rapid acquisition of these skills.
Now, this can involve either, for example, the development of more appropriate
practice activities, the development of more reflective thought processes
that facilitate decision-making, and also the use of simulation training,
which can involve using video or virtual reality environments.
So we create the types of situations that they would normally experience during
competition.
And there's at least, well, over 100 published papers now that
have demonstrated the viability of using these types of instructional
approaches to enhance the more rapid acquisition of these types of skills.
>> I'm actually going to come back, Mark, and
ask a question a little bit later about virtual reality or kind of these more
embedded perspectives that are becoming more popular and more affordable.
Before getting to that, though, could you comment on
much of the work that you've done has been on using eye correcting technology,
looking at eye movement recordings, and inferring
attentional allocation based on these types of recordings.
Can you comment on the benefits in the limits of
those sorts of tudies in terms of attention allocation and
perhaps differences in where we're looking and
what we're actually seeing and how we may be processing information that we
are acquiring from different areas of a visual display.
>> Essentially, what our research evidence has demonstrated over the last few years
is that underpinning effective anticipation in sport, for
instance, are these underlying perceptual cognitive skills.
These perceptual cognitive skills, for instance,
include the ability of elite athletes to better pick up information from
the postural orientation of an opponent or the body shape of an opponent
ahead to a key event like ball racket or a ball foot contact.
We also know that experts develop a superior ability to recognize familiarity
and patterns in evolving sequences of playing team sports.
If they can obviously identify the pattern early on in development,
then they'll better able to predict what the end product of that sequence would be.
We also know that experts developed a more refined knowledge of situational
probabilities or expectations in regards to given the context and
the situation, what is more likely to happen in that particular scenario?
So all of these perceptual cognitive skills develop through long-term
exposure to the sport and engagement in the types of practice activities that
facilitate the development of these types of skills.
So we know that those are the determining factors that
guide the development of game intelligence skill.
Surprisingly, you will often hear the commentator in sport suggest that
an athlete has a great eye or superb vision, but the evidence actually
supporting the superior visual functioning of elite athletes is not that strong.
So it's not necessarily the quality of the information that arrives at the back of
the retina that's important but the manner in which that information is perceived and
processed, and this is largely due to the development of
adaptations to memory through experience and exposure to the sport.
That seems to be the key factor in determining expertise in this particular
domain.
I didn't quite answer your question though very much.
>> You did, and when you look at the perceptual training to come back to
perceptual training programs or perceptual skills training programs,
oftentimes, those interventions are geared towards helping or
training aspiring experts to look at specific areas of the display.
But the reality is that
the perspective that they are looking through is quite different than
the one that an expert is when they're looking potentially at the same area.
So the level of domain-specific knowledge and knowledge structures and
pattern recognition capabilities that underlie an expert search pattern
are inherently different, because of these accumulated hours of practice and
domain-specific knowledge that they've acquired because of that.
So in terms of the overall effectiveness of a training program,
It's one thing to train where the learner is looking,
it's another to train them on why they're looking, where they're looking, and
what sorts of connections, patterns, and knowledge basings for
why they're looking should be driving where they're looking.
So the information that they're actually gathering from those areas would be
different.
Yet, I think much of your work has shown that despite these limitations,
that in fact, training these skills can be quite beneficial, and
perhaps most beneficial if they're then paired with some instruction that
is going to a narrative that will underlie the kinds of patterns that they
should be demonstrating in their intentional allocation,
whether it be through Or observable through eye movements or otherwise.
>> Yeah, I mean, I would comment.
I mean, clearly you're right.
We have over the years undertaken a number of studies where we've measured the gaze
behaviors of elite and less elite athletes in a variety of different sports.
I mean, we've done so in field situations on the tennis court, for instance,
here at the University of Florida years ago.
And often in the laboratory using film-based simulations or
recreation of sport situations.
And more often than not, we do find that experts tend to fixate on different
areas of the display for varying periods of time using a more efficient and
effective visual search strategy or behaviors.
However, sometimes we don't necessarily find differences in the gaze behaviors.
And the differences in those instances are more to do with the quality of
the information that's extracted.
So there is a difference, for instance, between looking and seeing.
So the systems that we use to measure gaze behaviors tell us where somebody is
looking, but they don't necessarily tell us the information that they're
actually seeing from that environment.
A number of our training studies have tried to use the gaze behaviors of expert
performers, and to try and
model those gaze behaviors onto less expert performers.
And this has had some beneficial effects on performance.
As you suggested, those training programs are more likely to be efficient, however,
if we also make stronger efforts to develop the underlying knowledge
base that underpins perception in those environments.
So it's not just the looking, it's seeing the information.
What are the key postural cues?
What are the key patterns of play and
the information that you need to detect that pattern?
And what is the likely probability of certain events occurring given
a particular context and situation that the athlete is being presented with?
So they're all knowledge driven factors.
So any straight training program, I think, would try and
optimize both the use of the visual system in picking up that information.
The efficiency of the perceptual cognitive systems and
then processing that information.
>> So Mark, you commented earlier on really the importance of mimicking
the performance environment, the competitive environment as much
as possible in terms of being able to then transfer what is being done in practice
to the actual field of play or court of play.
We could, I think, talk about a number of
differences between practice and competition.
But I think it's widely accepted that in the competition
arena there's going to be an elevated level of emotion, emotionality,
arousal, anxiety, and so forth.
And I know you've done quite a bit of work looking at how emotional reactions,
emotional responses can impact the intentional patterns,
the intentional focus, indices that are demonstrated even by high level athletes.
Can you comment a little bit on how the emotions we experience can impact
the intentional mechanisms that ultimately dictate the way that we're going
to perform?
>> I mean, the first point I would raise is that we are largely
a product of our environment.
So the key issue is that the training environment and the practice environment
has therefore got to match the environment of the competitive match play scenario.
And quite often, actually, when we've done detailed analyses of what coaches do with
athletes in practice, what we find is that there is a bit of a mismatch between what
happens in training and what happens in matches.
There's a tendency, for instance, for
coaches to rely too heavily on drill and grid-based structures,
practice sessions, rather than using more dynamic team game situations.
I mean, similarly there is a tendency to have lower levels of fatigue and
lower levels of anxiety in practice than you would have during competition.
And there's now a substantive body of research work that shows that
emotions like anxiety and other stressors like
fatigue have a negative influence on the manner in which we process information.
So therefore, if your training environments don't have the same
intensity, the same stressors that you would have during normal competition,
then you have to question in terms of the transferability of that practice to
the match situation.
And if I could come up with one empirical measure, actually it would be a quotient
of the transferability of practice time to competition time match play.
because it obviously gives us a measure of the efficiency of the practice or
training environment.
And I've commented several times on the fact that elite athletes accumulate
significant amounts of practice over numerous years within the sport.
It's not just the quantity of the practice,
it's also the quality of the practice.
So what I'd like to see moving forward is greater interaction between scientists and
coaches to better understand how do we create training and practice environments
that are more realistic and allow some of the key adaptations to occur, so that
it is better transferred to match play and the actual competition environment.
>> Thanks again, really a nice segue back to the topic of virtual reality or
more immersive kinds of experiences that now technology is
allowing us to take advantage of in training athletes.
And so, on that note, I think it's
safe to say that there is some nice literature in the expertise
body of literature as well as outside of it that could speak to this.
In terms of what are the advantages, if we compare, for example,
a virtual reality simulation to just a two-dimensional display,
even if it's from the same perspective, a kind of an in the action point of view.
What sorts of advantages might be afforded by virtual reality as
opposed to a more traditional approach to showing athletes video or
film of what to expect in a given situation, and then moving on or
integrating that somehow into a practice drill?
Can you comment, and I guess an area that
I'm thinking specifically of is perception action coupling.
And the reality that maybe we can now do more because of this immersiveness
in that regard rather than just simply observing, retaining information,
going back on the field, and demonstrating we can actually do it in the action now.
>> I mean, firstly I'd make the comment that I guess there are a whole range of
different approaches that we could use to try and
facilitate the more rapid acquisition of these perceptual cognitive skills,
some of which involve using field-based practices.
Some of which involve using video and other types of interventions
to develop the right kinds of thought processes in athletes,
both during training and competition.
In regards to the use of simulation, the majority of the work in
sport has used video mainly because it's more efficient, it's less costly.
I mean, virtual reality does offer some advantages,
notably it's a more immersive environment, so
you do actually interact with the stimuli more so than you do using video.
There hasn't been any direct studies that I've actually compared
the relative effectiveness of video and virtual reality platforms, but
I guess the key thing about simulations, whether it's video or
Virtual reality base is the level of fidelity in a sense, so whether they
physically and psychologically recreate the performance environment.
So clearly, if we can develop virtual reality simulations that move us closer
to the real match situations, then I think that they provide potentially some very
exciting opportunities, both to train anticipation and
decision making skills, and also as a method to providing feedback to athletes.
Because I know, for instance, a lot of the sports teams are now using tracking
systems that provide movement data for players across the course of the game.
And then that data can then be ported into virtual environments.
So for instance, you could put the player back in the situation from the previous
game that you may have made a mistake and
use it as a great opportunity to provide feedback.
As well as potentially using it with that athlete or
another athletes as an opportunity to get a chance
to make that decision again in a practice environment rather than a match situation.
So there's no doubt that in future virtual reality
is likely to have an increasing role in trying to develop some of these
game intelligence skills in high performance sport.
I guess the biggest factor at the moment is the cost which
does remain somewhat high.
>> And I think that is, well, clearly that's changing.
I know that even in American college football,
there are several teams now that are using virtual reality systems.
I think from a cost basis it's much more affordable.
I think there is always the search for
the latest greatest technology and/or body of knowledge or
information they can use to, I guess, and now the expert advantage.
And I think it also offers a distinct advantage
in terms of the capability to practice more, in some cases,
without suffering from the deleterious effects of over-training,
over-practicing and so forth that can also occur by having
to be out on the field and training all the time.
But that raises some interesting empirical questions as to, with the advent and
use of these technologies, is it a difference in terms of the quality of
what's being done, or is it just the reality that it's
the amount of practice that is going to ultimately make the difference.
You have more opportunity to practice more stuff more often in competitive
environments to really make the ultimate difference in performance.
>> Yeah, I mean, that's certainly an advantage of using technology particularly
from an anticipation decision making perspective in that you can give enough
extended practice on this particular area,
whether it's using virtual reality, video, a smartphone, a tablet.
Kids these days are used to that type of technology,
and I guess they view the world to a large extent as determined
by their engagement with that type of technology.
So it certainly presents a great opportunity
to specifically develop those skills.
I mean, the challenge, of course, with physical practice is you don't
often get into situations where they maybe have to make up specific decisions.
That in itself is a challenge.
So if you can isolate that for systematic training using technology, then
I think it's a great tool for the coach to try and develop these kinds of skills.
As we said in one of our earlier conversations, earlier questions,
is that the key issue is that the highest level,
it's often the thought that anticipation and decision making are key.
So maybe in the future it will be a challenging and exciting area to see how
we can better harness this new technology to try and find ways to
develop better anticipators and decision makers at an early stage of development.
I guess in some sports that's worth an awful lot of money.
So I think that could be an exciting area for applied research moving forward.
>> Well, Mark, there's little doubt that you will be at the forefront
of the future of application of sports science,
particularly as it relates to developing skill and talent.
And I look forward to our next opportunity to chat, whether it be on film or not.
Thank you so much for your time.
Really a wealth of information in a relatively short period of time.
So thank you very much for being with us.
>> Okay, my pleasure.
It's always a great joy to spend some time with you.
