An Exploratory Study of Aging and Perceptual-Motor Expertise in Handball Goalkeepers

Abstract

Few studies have examined the effect of age on skilled perception. The purpose of this study was to determine whether the perceptual-motor abilities of highly skilled performers in dynamic, time-constrained sports exhibited the same pattern of age-related decline seen in other areas. The sample for this study involved five age-specific groups of handball goalkeepers. Each participant completed an eye-tracking task, a temporal occlusion task, and an eight-choice reaction time task. Results revealed age-related declines in motor performance but not perceptual performance. Skilled perception appears resistant to normal age-related declines over time through the use of compensatory mechanisms.

Acknowledgments

This research was sponsored by the German Institute for Sport Science (VF 0407/06/47/2003–2004) and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (grant no. 410–04–1207). It was conducted at the Institute for Sport and Sport Science, University of Heidelberg. The authors would like to thank Sibille Abel, Florian Fath, and Ulrike Langenstein for their helping hand in data collection and data analyses. The authors would also like to thank those who gave them valuable advice and feedback on the current paper: Sean Horton, Norbert Hagemann, and Steve Cobley as well as one reviewer and the section editor.

Notes

¹The adult participants are from a study by schorer(2005).

Note. All values are in years. Values enclosed in parentheses represent standard deviations.