Psychology of Learning

Module 08: Sports Psychology

Key Terms

Arousal: A general state of physiological and psychological activation, ranging from deep sleep (very low arousal) to extreme excitement or panic (very high arousal); involves both bodily changes (increased heart rate, muscle tension, adrenaline release) and psychological changes (heightened alertness, narrowed attention).

Closed-Loop Movement: Movement whereby the individual continually receives and can react to feedback about whether the movement is proceeding correctly; the person monitors ongoing performance and makes adjustments in real-time.

Continuous Motor Skills: Movements that extend indefinitely over time without clear beginning or ending points, such as swimming, running, steering a car, or tracking a moving target with your eyes.

Discrete Motor Skills: Movements that are completed shortly after they are begun, with definite beginning and ending points; examples include throwing a ball, hitting a tennis serve, pressing a piano key, or pulling a trigger.

Distributed Practice: A training procedure in which fairly brief practice periods alternate with rest periods; practice sessions are spaced out over time and produce superior motor learning compared to massed practice.

External Imagery: Third-person imagery that involves watching yourself perform from an outside observer’s perspective, as if viewing yourself on video; emphasizes visual form and technique, useful for analyzing and correcting movement patterns.

Internal Imagery: First-person imagery that involves seeing and feeling the performance from your own perspective, as if looking through your own eyes during actual performance; emphasizes kinesthetic sensations and closely matches actual performance experience.

Inverted-U Theory: Another name for the Yerkes-Dodson Law; describes the relationship between arousal and performance as an inverted U-shaped curve, where performance increases with arousal up to an optimal point, then declines with further arousal increases.

Ironic Errors Theory: The theory proposed by Wegner (1997) stating that people have a tendency to make a false movement that they are trying hard to avoid, especially if their attention is distracted; the very act of trying not to do something increases the likelihood of doing it.

Knowledge of Performance (KP): The delivery of information about the sequence of components of a complex movement; provides feedback about the process—how the movement was executed—rather than just indicating whether the outcome was correct.

Knowledge of Results (KR): In motor-skill learning, feedback given to the learner about how close their movement came to the goal; provides information about performance outcomes.

Massed Practice: A training procedure in which practice takes place in one continuous block without rest periods; the learner practices extensively in a single session but typically shows inferior long-term learning compared to distributed practice.

Mental Imagery: Also called visualization, mental practice, or mental rehearsal; the cognitive rehearsal of a task in the absence of overt physical movement, where athletes imagine performing skills, feeling movements, or experiencing competitive situations without actually moving their bodies.

Motor Programs: Brain or spinal cord mechanisms that control a sequence of movements and do not rely on sensory feedback from one movement to initiate the next movement; pre-structured commands that run off automatically once initiated, proposed by Lashley (1951).

Motor Trace: In Adams’s two-stage theory, the memory of movements themselves—the motor commands and muscle activations that produce behavior; refers to the workings of the action system that generates movement.

Movement Sequences: Movements that must be performed in a fixed sequence and with correct timing; may be cyclical and repetitive (walking, swimming) or non-cyclical (typing a word, playing a musical phrase).

Negative Transfer: When practice on one task impairs learning or performance on another task; the first task creates interference or inappropriate habits for the second task.

Open-Loop Movement: Movement performed without the aid of feedback; once initiated, the movement proceeds without modification based on sensory information because movements are too fast for feedback to influence them during execution.

Perceptual Trace: In Adams’s two-stage theory, the learner’s memory of what correct performance should feel like—the sensory feedback associated with successful movements; serves as the internal standard against which performance is compared.

Positive Transfer: When practice on one task improves learning or performance on another task; the skills or knowledge from the first task facilitate the second task.

Response Chain: A sequence of learned behaviors that must occur in a specific order, with a primary reinforcer delivered only after the final response; behaviors stay in correct sequence because each response produces a stimulus serving as a discriminative stimulus for the next response.

Schema Theory: Schmidt’s (1975) theory proposing that by practicing different variations of the same response, people develop general rules (schemas) that allow them to perform responses they have never practiced before; schemas are abstract representations capturing relationships between parameters rather than specific movement details.

Transfer of Training: When experience on one task affects performance on another task; similar to generalization in animal learning studies but specifically addresses motor skills.

Yerkes-Dodson Law: The principle that performance increases as arousal increases, but only up to an optimal point, beyond which further increases in arousal cause performance to decline; optimal arousal level varies based on task complexity, skill level, and personality.