Goal-directed imitation: The means to an end
Section snippets
Participants
Sixteen mixed gender primary school children aged between 10 and 11 years old (mean age 10 years 10 months) were randomly assigned to two groups (n = 8). Prior to group allocation, all participants completed a pre-acquisition questionnaire. Data from these questionnaires indicated that none of the participants had learned to juggle either in school or at home, and hence all were categorised as novice jugglers. The two groups were defined as: observational learning group (OL) and control group
Juggling cycle scores
The OL and CON group’s juggling cycle scores are displayed in Table 1. Significant main effects were observed for group L(2) = 21.5, p < 0.05 and practice, L(2) = 8.89, p < 0.05. There was also a significant Group × PRAC interaction, L(2) = 8.85, p < 0.05. The OL group executed more juggling cycles in PRAC 2 and PRAC 3 than the CON group, who were unable to execute a single juggling cycle. Further, the OL group performed more juggling cycles at PRAC 2 than PRAC 1 (p < 0.025), and then continued to improve from
Discussion
The present experiment was designed to examine the influence of observation on the learning of a three-ball cascade juggling task, which is optimally performed by adopting a highly specific spatio-temporal movement pattern (Beek and van Santvoord, 1992, Huys and Beek, 2002). It was predicted that participants who observed a model would learn to execute a movement pattern (means) and ball trajectory pattern (ends) similar to the model. Moreover, this should also lead to concomitant improvements
Acknowledgement
The authors extend their gratitude to the staff and children of Cranberry Lane Infant School, Alsager, UK.
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