Verbal Instructions and Motor Learning: How Analogy and Explicit Instructions Influence the Development of Mental Representations and Tennis Serve Performance

Abstract

To better understand the benefits of using analogy and explicit instructions, the underlying cognitive mechanism remains to be explored. The concept of chunking provides a promising approach to the cognitive mechanism of instructions and can be approximated by analyzing athletes' mental representations. The purpose of this study was to investigate the influence of analogy and explicit instructions on performance and the cognitive representations of the tennis serve in intermediate participants over the course of a 5-week training period. Junior tennis players (N = 44; M = 11.5 years) were tested on their tennis serve and, based on their initial performance and their individual error patterns, assigned to one of three groups: an analogy group (N = 15), an explicit group (N = 15), or a control group (N = 14). Their performance and their mental representation structures were assessed prior to and after the 5-week training period and again after a retention period of 14 days. Independent of group, findings demonstrated higher velocity from pretest to posttest. Participants in both the analogy and the explicit group showed enhanced accuracy over time and more functional mental representation structures. Thus, both analogy instruction and explicit instruction helped to structure mental representations in their long-term memory.

Motor Imagery Practice and Cognitive Processes

“…Results showed that participants who had practiced mentally, either solely or in combination with physical practice, developed mental representation structures that were more functional (i.e., were more similar to those of experts) than were those of participants who had not practiced mentally. Interestingly, Meier et al (2020) showed recently that athletes' mental representations of the tennis serve changed over time as a function of coaching instructions (explicit or analogybased). The findings of Frank et al (2014Frank et al ( , 2016 suggest that MIP operates at a relatively high level in the motor systemrefining and elaborating athletes' mental representations of action during early stages of skill acquisition.…”

Cognitive Interaction Technology in Sport—Improving Performance by Individualized Diagnostics and Error Prediction

“…(1) More recently, the Adjusted Rand Index (ARI) gained popularity among SDA-M researchers for measuring the similarity of two participants' mental representation structures (see e.g., Frank et al, 2013Frank et al, , 2014Frank et al, , 2016Land et al, 2014;Jeraj et al, 2017;Kim et al, 2017;Meier et al, 2020). The ARI is bounded above by a maximum of 1 and takes on negative values (with no well-defined lower bound) when similarity falls below the expected value from random clustering with the same number of clusters and elements in each (Hubert and Arabie, 1985).…”

Performance anxiety: How to play reliable and rational tennis by reducing mental pressure

“…First of all, one must be convinced that solving an exchange with a volley is very convenient. If we consider that the volley and, even more, the smash are the easiest fundamentals to acquire, we understand how inserting these game solutions into one's technical-tactical baggage, benefits considerably (Meier et al 2020). These strokes allow to the player not only to run less, but shorten the time of an exchange, and of the whole match.…”