Local Navon letter processing affects skilled behavior: A golf-putting experiment

Abstract

Expert or skilled behaviors (for example, face recognition or sporting performance) are typically performed automatically and with little conscious awareness. Previous studies, in various domains of performance, have shown that activities immediately prior to a task demanding a learnt skill can affect performance. In sport, describing the to-be-performed action is detrimental; whereas in face recognition, describing a face or reading local Navon letters is detrimental. Two golf-putting experiments are presented that compare the effects that these three tasks have on experienced and novice golfers. Experiment 1 found a Navon effect on golf performance for experienced players. Experiment 2 found, for experienced players only, that performance was impaired following the three tasks described above when compared to reading or global Navon tasks. It is suggested that the three tasks affect skilled performance by provoking a shift from automatic behavior to a more analytic style.By demonstrating similarities between effects in face recognition and sporting behavior, it is hoped to better understand concepts in both fields.Navon effects in golf performance 3

Verbalization and musical memory in string players

“…Additionally, the present results seem to contradict the idea that any shift from procedural to conscious processing can result in the creation of a procedural interference effect, although there are a few important reasons why the procedural interference findings from previous research (Flegal & Anderson, 2008;Lewis & Dawkins, 2015) might not be directly translatable to the musical memorization task used here. First, the memory task in this experiment did not address the fundamental motor processes involved in playing a string instrument, while the novel golf-swing task used in the two aforementioned studies seems to more directly address fundamental golfing technique.…”

“…Although these situations are notably different from a music student verbalizing about a new piece of music, as the music student is not verbalizing about the procedural movements involved in playing an instrument, there is evidence that any cross modal verbalization activity could impair procedural memory. Lewis and Dawkins (2015) found a similar overshadowing effect in intermediate golfing performance when participants were asked to locally identify Navon letters 2 or when they were asked to identify faces. These findings indicate that the overshadowing effect is not due to the relationship between the procedural task and verbalization material, but instead could be the result of a switch from an implicit form of processing to a more active, explicit form of processing, as originally suggested by F. Schooler, Fiore, and Brandimonte (1997).…”

“…Conversely, experiments that seek to more directly produce a procedural overshadowing effect in music learning might help students understand what practices to avoid. It is possible that verbalization about novel techniques that rely exclusively on procedural memory might impact skill acquisition in a similar way to the effects demonstrated by Flegal and Anderson (2008), Lewis and Dawkins (2015), and Duke et al (2011).…”

“…There exists evidence in the cognitive psychological literature in support of competing hypotheses for the outcome of such an experiment: it is possible that verbalization could aid in recall both by highlighting patterns and constraints that inform the music's creation (i.e., Ginsborg & Sloboda, 2007;Halpern & Bower, 1982;Mishra, 2010) and by facilitating the creation of explicit performance cues that help to bridge gaps between associative recall chains (Chaffin et al, 2016;Chaffin & Imreh, 2002). Conversely, verbalization may hinder recall by interfering with the creation of procedural and auditory memories necessary for musical performance (Flegal & Anderson, 2008;Lewis & Dawkins, 2015). The collegiate-level string musicians that participated in this study demonstrated significantly better recall performance on the long-term retention task when they were given the opportunity to verbalize about the etude they were learning in addition to practicing it via rote repetition, although no such difference was observed in the immediate recall test.…”

Global-local processing impacts academic risk taking

“…Repeatedly identifying the large letter induces global processing, whereas repeatedly identifying the small letter induces local processing (see, also, Lim & Goh, 2013). Global versus local processing styles have been successfully induced in various studies via this approach and were found to differentially impact such subsequent tasks as face recognition (Macrae & Lewis, 2002), eyewitness identification (Perfect, Dennis, & Snell, 2007), and golf-putting performance (Lewis & Dawkins, 2015).…”