A Study on Cognitive Transformation in the Process of Acquiring Movement Skills for Changing Running Direction

Abstract

In ball games, acquiring skills to change the direction becomes necessary. For revealing the mechanism of skill acquisition in terms of the relevant field, it would be necessary to take an approach regarding players' cognition as well as body movements measurable from outside. In the phase of change-of-direction performance that this study focuses on, cognitive factors including the prediction of opposite players' movements and judgements of the situation have significance. The purpose of this study was to reveal cognitive transformation in the skill acquisition process for change-of-direction performance. The survey was conducted for three months from August 29 to November 28, 2020, and those surveyed were seven university freshmen belonging to women's basketball club of M University. The way to analyze verbal reports collected in order to explore the changes in the players' cognition is described in Sect. 2. In Sect. 3, we made a plot graph showing temporal changes in respective factors based on coding outcomes for verbal reports. Consequently, as cognitive transformation in the skill acquisition process for change-of-direction performance, four items such as (1) goal setting for skill acquisition, (2) experience of change in running direction, (3) experience of speed and acceleration, and (4) experience of the movement of lower extremities such as legs and hip joints were suggested as common cognitive transformation. In addition, cognitive transformation varied by the degree of skill acquisition for change-of-direction performance. It was indicated that paying too much attention to body feelings including the position of and shift in the center of gravity in the body posed an obstacle to the skill acquisition for change-of-direction performance.