Mental Rotation of Tactic Board Instructions in Basketball: Domain-Specific Expertise Improves On-Court Performance

Using pointing gestures to convey tactical information: investigating the roles of expertise and complexity

Coach's speech and pointing gestures are closely related. However, the question of whether the coach's pointing gestures influence the learning of complex game systems is still unclear. The present study examined the moderating roles of content complexity and expertise level on recall performance, visual attention, and mental effort through the coach's pointing gestures. One hundred and ninety-two novice and expert basketball players were randomly assigned to one of the four experimental conditions (simple content + no-gesture, simple content + with-gesture, more complex content + no-gesture, or more complex content + with-gesture). The results showed that regardless of the complexity of the content, novices showed significantly better recall performance, better visual search on the static diagrams and lower mental effort in the with-gesture condition than in the no-gesture condition. However, the results showed that experts benefited equally from both conditions (with-gesture and no-gestures) when the content was simple, whereas they benefited more from the condition with-gesture when the content was more complex. The findings and their implications for the design of learning materials are discussed in terms of cognitive load theory.

Mental Rotation in Sports

Abstract: This study further validates the sport-specific Mental Rotation Test – Basketball (MRT-BB) in which participants solve 24 items regarding basketball plays. The task of each item consists of comparing four alternative stimuli with a criterion stimulus and identifying the two “correct” alternatives. A total of 203 participants (101 females) took part in this experiment in which they solved the original MRT and the MRT-BB. The results replicate the findings of Weigelt and Memmert (2021 ). The number of items attempted declined toward the end of each set, with participants solving more items in the second set and men outperforming women. While participants solved more items on the MRT-BB, performance in both tests was positively correlated. Our replication of the previous results supports the validity of the MRT-BB. The correlation supports the notion that the mental rotation of the sport-specific stimuli is based on more general mental rotation skills.