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Kreativitätstraining verbessert Kreativitätstestresultate – funktionales Techniktraining verbessert Kreativität im Spiel
No full textCreativity in elite youth football: Enhancing players’ motor skills rather than a divergent thinking ability fosters creative actions
No full textRisk Optimisation in Action: Differences between Fixated Aim Points and Movement Outcomes in VR Throwing
Full text linkCreativity and gaze behaviour in football
No full textPerforming creative actions is considered a decisive element in football. Recent studies have suggested that football players’ creativity is underpinned by a specific visual search strategy (e.g., Roca et al., 2021). Specifically, studies showed that players who scored high in a football-specific creativity task used more fixations of shorter durations than players who scored low. In the creativity task, players were asked to name as many solution ideas as possible. From an applied perspective, the questions arise: is this gaze strategy generally beneficial to perform creative actions? Should this gaze pattern be trained to improve creativity?
In contrast to the idea of one single creativity-related gaze pattern, eye-tracking research in sports suggests that optimal gaze behaviour is highly dependent on situational task demands (Vater et al., 2020). Moreover, generally increasing the number of short fixations is expected to be dysfunctional to both motor accuracy and to the perception of task-relevant opportunities due to saccade-related costs. Accordingly, we hypothesized that many fixations of short duration are positively associated with players’ ability to generate many ideas in the specific creativity task but not with performing creative actions.
Fifteen footballers participated in an experiment with two conditions. In one condition (DT-condition), we replicated Roca et al.’s studies: participants stood in front of a large screen and with a ball in front of them. They were asked to view 20 videos of attacking situations and imagine themselves as the player in ball possession. At key moments of the situation, the videos were occluded. At this point, players’ task was to physically play the ball and verbally confirm their decision. Subsequently, the last frame of the video reappeared, and their task was to name as many solution ideas as possible within 45 s. Moreover, a second condition was added (action-condition). While the first part of the task remained identical, the last frame did not reappear after playing the ball. In the action condition, the task-instruction was—as in a real game—to perform the most promising solution. In both conditions, eye tracking data were recorded.
Results indicate that many fixations of short durations were linked to generating more ideas in the DT-condition—replicating Roca et al.’s (2021) finding—, however, not with performing creative solutions in the action-condition. As predicted, in the action-condition, the pattern was reversed: Players that performed more functional and creative actions used less fixations per second. For practice the results challenge the idea of training a specific creativity-related gaze pattern to improve creativity. Rather, our findings suggest that training should provide learning opportunities to acquire functional gaze strategies that are optimally adapted to situational task demands.
References
Roca, A., Ford, P. R., & Memmert, D. (2021). Perceptual-cognitive processes underlying creative expert performance in soccer. Psychological Research, 85(3), 1146–1155. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-020-01320-5
Vater, C., Williams, A. M., & Hossner, E.-J. (2020). What do we see out of the corner of our eye? The role of visual pivots and gaze anchors in sport. International Review of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 13(1), 81–103. https://doi.org/10.1080/1750984X.2019.158208
Bayes on the court: Evidence for continuous prior-knowledge integration in virtual-reality tennis returns
Full text linkIntroduction Due to noisy signals in the sensorimotor system, our perception is constantly subject to uncertainty. This is particularly evident in highly dynamic situations, such as returning a tennis serve. In fundamental research taking on a Bayesian approach to decision-making and sensorimotor control, it is argued that uncertainty is reduced by the reliability-weighted integration of current sensory information and accumulated prior knowledge (Körding & Wolpert, 2006). However, the question arises whether the same Bayesian mechanism also holds to explain human behaviour in more complex real-world situations, as it is common in the world of sports. Therefore, we investigated this mechanism in a virtual-tennis return situation.
Methods To this end, 32 young adults learned two probability distributions of serve’s impact locations in a within-subject design over two days that differed regarding the central tendency closer to the left or the right of the service field. The kinematic information in the serving movement remained identical over all trials due to the identical avatar simulation. The perceptual demands in tracking the ball were high because of a speed similar to a serve in professional tennis. As an indicator of participants’ expectation of the ball-bounce location in action, we assessed the gaze fixation after the predictive saccade before the ball’s bounce.
Results A shift of the fixation in relation to the ball’s actual impact location towards the respective distribution’s central tendency was detected that, on top of this, increased over the acquisition period.
Discussion/Conclusion These results perfectly fit a Bayesian explanatory framework since (1) Körding and Wolpert’s (2006) claim that prior knowledge is integrated into tennis returns according to Bayesian principles is empirically confirmed, and (2) prior-knowledge integration must be understood as a dynamic process in which the eye movements in the early phase of the return movement are increasingly affected by accumulated prior knowledge – which, to our knowledge, was empirically confirmed for complex sensorimotor behaviour for the first time by our study.
References
Körding, K. P. & Wolpert, D. M. (2006). Bayesian decision theory in sensorimotor control. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 10(7), 319–326. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2006.05.00
Kreativitätstraining verbessert Kreativitätstestresultate – funktionales Techniktraining verbessert Kreativität im Spiel
No full textOn the Issue of Developing Creative Players in Team Sports: A Systematic Review and Critique From a Functional Perspective
Full text linkDriven by the practical goal of developing creative players, several approaches totraining creativity have been proposed and underpinned by empirical studies in sportscience. However, the scope of these studies encompasses various aspects, whichhave all been subsumed under the singular label of “creativity.” Therefore, this systematicreview aims to disentangle the pursued lines of thought in order to facilitate thederivation of well-grounded recommendations for sports practice. To this end, 38studies are presented and characterized in terms of their underlying conceptualizationsand measures of creativity. In most studies, creativity is conceptualized as a player’sdomain-specific divergent thinking (DT) ability, reflectedby individual differences in thenumber, variety and originality of ideas he or she is able to generate in response to gamesituations. Empirical studies indicate that DT can be improved by practice. However, thecritical assumption that an enhanced DT ability transfers to creative on-field actions hasyet to be tested. On the basis of the reviewed literature, an alternative point of view isproposed. In line with a relational understanding of creativity and a functional approachto behavioral control, it is hypothesized that an enhanced repertoire of sensorimotorskills increases the probability for performing functional solutions that, within a specificsocial and cultural frame of reference, go beyond the expected and consequently appearcreative to the observer. In the context of sports practice,the proposed conceptualre-orientation would then suggest, rather than seeking ways to improve players’ DTability, to target sensorimotor skills that allow players to perform a variety of task-solutionsand thus to act less predictably to the opponent—or in other words, more creative
Creativity in team sports: Enhancing players’ motor skills rather than divergent thinking fosters creative actions
No full textIn team sports, developing creative players is widely discussed as a crucial – as well as challenging – objective. In respective empirical studies, creativity has predominantly been understood as a player’s divergent thinking (DT) ability and assessed with specific cognitive tests (Memmert, 2015). Numerous studies indicate that DT can be improved with training. So far, however, no empirical support has been provided for the underlying assumption that enhanced DT transfers to creative on-field actions. Alternatively, we hypothesize that players’ potential to perform creative actions is foremost rooted in their sensorimotor-skill repertoire rather than in DT. Both explanations were put to test in a series of studies consisting of two field-based experiments (I, II) and two correlational studies (I, II) in elite youth football. In field-based experiment I (N = 16; males; Mage = 12.90 +/- 0.27), improvements in DT did not manifest in more creative on-field actions. In contrast, players who received motor skill focussed training showed larger improvements not only in the functionality but also in the creativity of on-field actions. Correlational studies I (N = 33; males; Mage = 11.40 +/- 0.46) and II (N = 16; females; Mage = 17.51 +/- 0.81) perfectly support this finding indicating no correlations between on-field creativity and DT but moderate to large correlations between on-field creativity and motor-skill level. The results obtained in field-based experiment II (N = 34, males, Mage = 11.78 +/- 0.46) that was conducted recently to conclude the series of studies will be presented at the conference
Bayes on the court: Evidence for continuous prior-knowledge integration in virtual tennis returns
Full text linkRecent decades of research suggest that humans integrate current sensory information and prior expectations in a Bayesian way to guide behaviour. However, while Bayesian integration provides a powerful framework for perception, cognition and motor control, evidence is largely limited to simple lab tasks so far (Beck et al., 2023). Here we provide evidence for core Bayesian predictions in a complex sensorimotor task at the limit of human performance: returning tennis serves at a speed of 180 km/h or even 260 km/h
Bayes on the court: Evidence for continuous prior-knowledge integration in virtual-reality tennis returns
Full text linkDue to noisy signals in the sensorimotor system, our perception is constantly subject to uncertainty. This is particularly evident in highly dynamic situations, such as returning a tennis serve. In fundamental research taking on a Bayesian approach to decision-making and sensorimotor control, it is argued that uncertainty is reduced by the reliability-weighted integration of current sensory information and accumulated prior knowledge (Körding & Wolpert, 2006). Therefore, we investigated this mechanism in a virtual-tennis return situation.
To this end, 32 young adults (22 females and 10 males, Mage = 21.0, SD = 2.5) learned two probability distributions of serve’s impact locations in a within-subject design over two days that differed regarding the central tendency closer to the left or the right of the service field. The kinematic information in the serving movement remained identical over all trials due to the identical avatar simulation. The perceptual demands in tracking the ball were high because of a speed similar to a serve in professional tennis. As an indicator of participants’ expectation of the ball-bounce location in action, we assessed the gaze fixation after the predictive saccade before the ball’s bounce.
A shift of the fixation in relation to the ball’s actual impact location towards the respective distribution’s central tendency was detected that, on top of this, increased over the acquisition period. These results perfectly fit a Bayesian explanatory framework since (1) Körding and Wolpert’s (2006) claim that prior knowledge is integrated into tennis returns according to Bayesian principles is empirically confirmed, and (2) prior-knowledge integration must be understood as a dynamic process in which the eye movements in the early phase of the return movement are increasingly affected by accumulated prior knowledge – which, to our knowledge, was empirically confirmed for complex sensorimotor behaviour for the first time by our study.
Körding, K. P. & Wolpert, D. M. (2006). Bayesian decision theory in sensorimotor control. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 10(7), 319–326. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2006.05.00
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