Volume 3, Issue 1

The concepts of deliberate practice (Ericsson, Krampe, & Tesch-Römer, 1993) and deliberate play (i.e., informal youth-led sport play with peers, but without a coach, such as backyard soccer, basketball in the driveway; Côté, Baker, & Abernethy, 2007) have been influential on research into the acquisition of athletic expertise. Deliberate practice was defined to be undertaken for the extrinsic motive to achieve an improved performance, with the further criteria that it be physically and mentally highly effortful and not inherently enjoyable. Deliberate play was defined to be highly enjoyable and to be undertaken for the intrinsic motive to maximize enjoyment. However, the authors ascribed these attributes a priori to athletes’ involvement in the activities but did not empirically measure the ascribed attributes. In this study, we examined whether these a priori pre-supposed attributes are underpinned by empirical correspondence in youth athletes. A total of 208 athletes (13.6 years; SD = 2.6) from several sports reported their motives and inherent enjoyment of coach-led practice and youth-led sport play in a questionnaire. The empirical findings did not provide support for some of the premises of the definitions of deliberate practice and deliberate play. Inherent enjoyment was high in both activities and did not differ. Youth athletes’ motives to engage in both sport activities comprised a broad multi-dimensional spectrum including health, general fitness, aesthetic experiences, social interaction, and recreation from daily hassle, not just performance or inherent enjoyment. Within the performance motive for coach-led practice, the intrinsic component was very pronounced while the extrinsic component was not. Furthermore, more successful youth athletes showed less empirical correspondence with premises of the deliberate practice concept than less successful athletes. The findings suggest that the definitions of deliberate practice and deliberate play should be empirically substantiated, rather than defining them by untested a priori premises.

In recent work, the Vanderbilt Holistic Processing Tests for novel objects (VHPT-NOs), were used to show that holistic processing for artificial objects increased as a function of parametric variation of experience. Here, novices are tested on the VHPT-Nos to address two questions. First, does the test detect any level of holistic processing for novel objects in novices? Second, how is part matching performance on this test related to object recognition ability, as measured by the Novel Object Memory Test (NOMT)? In a high-powered study, we provide substantial evidence of no holistic processing on the VHPT-NO in novices, including for arguably facelike symmetrical Greebles. Evidence of no correlations between measures of holistic processing suggests that these indices can be considered free of influences from domain-general selective attention. In contrast, overall performance in part matching in the VHPT-NO shows shared variance across categories, which we postulate is related to object recognition. A second study provides direct evidence that part matching measures to a large extent the same ability as whole object learning on the NOMT. Our results suggest that any holistic processing measured in the VHPT-NOs will not be contaminated by domain-general effects and can be considered entirely due to experience with a category. The VHPT-NO will therefore be useful in further examination of how different aspects of experience contribute to the development of holistic processing. Materials for the VHPT-NO are available at https://figshare.com/articles/VHPT_NO_zip/8345597.

Eye tracking is a powerful technique that helps reveal how people process visual information. This paper discusses a novel metric for indicating expertise in visual information processing. Named the Gaze Relational Index (GRI), this metric is defined as the ratio of mean fixation duration to fixation count. Data from two eye-tracking studies of professional vision and visual expertise in using 3D dynamic medical visualizations are presented as cases to illustrate the suitability and additional benefits of the GRI. Calculated values of the GRI were higher for novices than for experts, and higher in non-representative, semi-familiar / unfamiliar task conditions than in domain-representative familiar tasks. These differences in GRI suggest that, compared to novices, experts engaged in more knowledge-driven, top-down processing that was characterized by quick, exploratory visual search. We discuss future research aiming to replicate the GRI in professional domains with complex visual stimuli and to identify the moderating role of cognitive ability on GRI estimates.

Early sport specialization has recently become a growing concern among sport federations, because it is associated with deleterious effects that may lead to sport attrition. More specifically in ice hockey, some studies found that the dropout rate is approximately 5% per year. This study aims to assess the prevalence of early sport specialization (ESS) among adolescent hockey players and analyze the relationship between the degree of ESS and characteristics associated with long-term sports participation such as attitudes toward other active behaviors, physical self-perceptions, and social support. A sample of 404 adolescent hockey players (competitive/elite vs. recreational) from the province of Québec (Canada) completed a questionnaire during their hockey season. Group comparisons were performed based on ESS degree and for both levels of competition. Results revealed that early sport specialization seemed to be more prevalent among less competitive, non-elite, and older players. Furthermore, players who reported ESS showed less favorable scores on self-reported physical activity, less favorable attitudes toward sport and exercise, less social support in their sport, and they had lower scores in physical self-perceptions. This study highlights the importance of introducing adolescents to a range of sports and other types of active behaviors, especially during the off-season. Practical implications for sport stakeholders who want to promote long-term athlete development are discussed.

In the current sporting landscape, it is not uncommon for professional sport teams and organizations to employ multidisciplinary sport science support teams. In these teams and organizations, a “head of performance” may manage a number of sub-discipline specialists with the aim of enhancing athlete performance. Despite the best intentions of multidisciplinary sport science support teams, difficulties associated with integrating sub-disciplines to enhance performance preparation have become apparent. It has been suggested that the problem of integration is embedded in the traditional reductionist method of applied sport science, leading to the eagerness of individual specialists to quantify progress in isolated components. This can lead to “silo” working and decontextualized learning environments that can hinder athlete preparation. To address this challenge, we suggest that ecological dynamics is one theoretical framework that can inform common principles and language to guide the integration of sport science sub-disciplines in a Department of Methodology. The aim of a Department of Methodology would be for group members to work within a unified conceptual framework to (1) coordinate activity through shared principles and language, (2) communicate coherent ideas, and (3) collaboratively design practice landscapes rich in information (i.e., visual, acoustic, proprioceptive and haptic) and guide emergence of multi-dimensional behaviors in athlete performance.