Quiet eye training improves throw and catch performance in children
Introduction
It is well documented that children's motor skill competence is an important factor for a healthy and active lifestyle (Haga, 2008). Indeed, significant inverse correlations have been reported between children's motor coordination abilities and their body mass index (D’Hondt et al., 2013). Effective interventions that help children improve their performance in the fundamental motor skills underpinning physical activity, playground games, and sport may therefore have clinical health benefits. The current study seeks to apply a novel, brief intervention approach – quiet eye training – to the learning of a particular fundamental motor skill; throwing and catching.
Children have generally learned the skill of ball catching by age 10, however, some children still find this task difficult (e.g., Przysucha & Maraj, 2010). Wilson and colleagues (Wilson, Miles, Vine, & Vickers, 2013) recently examined the gaze behavior of children of varying motor coordination abilities in a throw and catch task in order to better understand the causes of these difficulties. The authors used Vickers’ (1996) quiet eye (QE) concept, which has reliably been shown to differentiate skilled performance in both targeting and interception tasks (see Vickers, 2007). The QE is defined as the final fixation or tracking gaze to a target before the initiation of a planned motor response and has been proposed to reflect a critical period of cognitive processing during which the control parameters of a motor skill are programmed (Vickers, 1996, Vickers, 2007).
Wilson et al. (2013) found significant group differences in both the duration of the targeting QE (preceding the throw) and the tracking QE (preceding the catch attempt); with more coordinated children having significantly longer targeting and tracking QE durations and better catching performance than less coordinated children. The authors suggested that the targeting and tracking QE durations represented the time needed to organize the neural networks underlying the throw and catch actions respectively. By extending the targeting QE duration, more coordinated children made more accurate throws, which in turn meant that they were able to initiate an earlier (and hence longer) tracking QE duration to support the catch attempt.
The aim of the current study is to develop and pilot test the efficacy of a quiet eye training (QET) intervention for throwing and catching in children, based on the findings of Wilson et al.’s (2013) cross-sectional study. While QET has not previously been used with children, previous research has demonstrated that it can expedite the skill learning process of novice adult performers (see Vine, Moore, & Wilson, 2014 for a recent review). For example, Vine and Wilson (2011) demonstrated that novice basketball players who were taught to use a long QE fixation on the hoop prior to free-throw shooting had a greater increase in free throw accuracy (pre- to post-test) than those trained using biomechanical cues. In line with these findings, we hypothesize that the QET children in the current study will reveal longer QE durations following training than their TT counterparts. Additionally, we hypothesize that although both groups of children are likely to improve their catching performance following training; this effect will be greater for the QET group.
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Participants
Thirty eight children (mean age, 10.32 years, SD = .57) were recruited from two year-five (4th grade) classes in two primary schools and were randomly assigned to a QET or TT intervention group. The study received ethical approval from a local ethics committee prior to testing and the children and their parents provided informed written consent.
Task
The catching task from the validated Movement Assessment Battery for Children (2nd Edition; MABC-2; Henderson, Sugden, & Barnett, 2007) was used to
Catching performance
The ANOVA revealed no significant main effect for intervention group, F(1,14) = .03, p = .87, ηp2 < .01, power = .05; or condition, F(1,14) = 3.56, p =.08, ηp2 = .20, power = .42. There was however a significant interaction effect, F(1,14) = 6.97, p = .02, ηp2 = .33. Follow up tests revealed that while there was a significant improvement in the catching performance of the QET group from pre- to post-test (p < .01), there was no significant improvement for the TT group (p = .67). There were no
Discussion
This is the first study to explore the efficacy of QET for motor skill learning in typically developing children, although the paradigm has been applied successfully in adults (see Vine et al., 2014). We have previously revealed that highly coordinated children reveal significantly longer targeting and tracking QE durations (QE1 and QE2) in this throw and catch task than less coordinated children (Wilson et al., 2013). We therefore predicted that QET's focus on optimizing gaze behavior may
Conflicts of interest
No conflicts of interest to declare.
Source of funding
This study is part of a larger project funded by the Waterloo Foundation (UK).
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