Especial Skill Effect Across Age and Performance Level: The Nature and Degree of Generalization

ABSTRACT

It has been claimed that an especial skill emerges after massive amounts of basketball practice. Despite this no direct evidence is available to support this claim. The authors aimed to shed light on this question. Thirty-seven male basketball players took part representing four groups: 2 groups of senior players, a cadet group, and a group of juniors. Players performed free throw shots from 7 distances including shots from the free throw line (15 ft). It was shown that an especial skill was present in senior players, but not in junior players who had only 3 years of playing experience. The authors present a descriptive model of especial skill and express it using the formalism of a hierarchical Bayesian model to fit the data and estimate the parameters. This model can account not only for the results, which indicate the presence and a substantial degree of generalizability of especial skill to nearby distances, but also for results of the original study on especial skill where it was proposed that specificity in practice leads to the emergence of the especial skill.

Keywords:

• motor learning
• especial skills
• Bayesian model
• practice specificity
• generalization

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Experiments described in the manuscript were conducted according to the ethical principles of American Psychological Association. All participants took part in the study on a voluntary basis and could discontinue their participation at any time without any consequences. Permission for the subjects to participate in the study was granted by the Committee for Ethics of the University School of Physical Education in Wrocław, Poland.

The authors would like to thank the authorities of WKS Slask Wrocław and WKK Wrocław for allowing them to conduct this study. They would also like to thank two anonymous reviewers for useful suggestions.

Notes

1. As one of the anonymous reviewers pointed out, our results could also be approximated by a nonlinear regression function, such as quadratic. We agree that a quadratic (or other nonlinear) regression function could be a good descriptive model. However, there is nothing in the motor control literature that suggests that this kind of function actually represents the underlying mechanisms and could be used as an explanatory model.