Along with the operationally defined concepts of dynamical systems theory comes a rich arsenal of mathematical methods and modeling tools that may be usefully employed in the study of complex sports behaviors. This entry highlights just a handful of those, which are all centered on the “problem” of dimensionality reduction. Before going into modeling, the
Sport enjoyment, or fun in children’s terms, is the most important and most studied positive emotion in youth, adolescent, and elite sport. Early youth sport research found that fun was one of the most important reasons given by athletes for choosing to participate in sports, and lack of fun was a prime explanation for dropping
Ethnicity refers to shared cultural traditions and history of a group or population. The collection of people who share an ethnicity is often called an ethnic group. An ethnic group shares a common culture that is reflected in language or dialect, religion, customs, clothing, food, and music, literature, or art. Ethnic groups are often associated
Expertise refers to the underlying qualities and skills that distinguish highly accomplished people, referred to as experts, from lesser skilled people. Experts are people who are exceptionally skilled in a particular task or domain and their expertise is typically evident across numerous aspects of human performance, including perception, cognition, and motor execution. Interestingly, despite the
Gender has a clear and powerful influence in society, and a particularly powerful and persistent influence in sport and exercise. Indeed, the sport world seems to exaggerate and highlight gender. Sport and physical activities remain largely sex segregated and male dominated. Gender is so embedded that trying to be nonsexist and treating everyone the same
Automaticity is the ability to execute a skill using no (or very few) information processing resources: attention and working memory. When a skill can be executed in this fashion, the performer has resources available to process other sources of information not directly required for the task. Automaticity is thought to be a hallmark of expert
Assimilation refers to the integration of one culture into another. This integration may include changes in cultural characteristics such as language, appearance, food, music, and religion among other customs. Cultural values and beliefs also influence this integration of cultures. Assimilation is relevant to sport performance in that sports occur in the context of culture, society,
In sport and exercise psychology, anticipation usually refers to the ability to quickly and accurately predict the outcome of an opponent’s action before that action is completed. Skilled athletes can use bodily cues to anticipate outcomes at earlier moments in an action sequence than can unskilled athletes, allowing them more time to perform an appropriate
In recent years, there has been an increase in research and practical applications concerning the use of biofeedback training for athletic performance enhancement. It is important to be aware that the terms biofeedback and biofeedback training are not identical, and therefore need to be defined separately. Biofeedback (BFB) is the output from an electronic device
Neural plasticity is the mechanism by which the brain encodes experience and learns new skills, behaviors, and habits in daily life and on the athletic field. Brain cells called neurons form a communication network that serves as the foundation of information processing in the brain. The neural network of the brain holds the capacity to