Plasticity of human handedness: decreased one-hand bias and inter-manual performance asymmetry in expert basketball players

Athletes frequently have to adapt their skills to fast changes of play, often requiring the flexible execution of a particular movement skill with either hand. To assess the influence of sport-specific expertise and extensive sport training on human laterality, a video analysis of regular basketball games was performed for professional, semi-professional, and amateur players to investigate how non-dominant hand use and proficiency change with increasing expertise. Our results showed that the right-hand (i.e. dominant hand) bias in basketball players is reduced with increasing expertise (i.e., competitive level). Accordingly, we found that professional players use their non-dominant hand more often and with greater success than semi-professional and amateur players. This was true for most of the basketball-specific skills. Based on these results, we assume that increasing amounts of bilateral practice can lead to a shift in task-specific manual preference towards a higher use of both hands in competition, as well as to a higher proficiency for non-dominant hand actions in particular. From an applied perspective, the more frequent use and higher proficiency of the non-dominant hand in professional basketball players, compared with amateurs, suggests that the context-specific and skilled use of the non-dominant hand is crucial for successful play at higher competitive levels in the sport of basketball.     

Motion Picture History

Paul Smith (ed.) The Historian and Film (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1976---$13.95)

Tino Balio (ed.) The American Film Industry (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1976---$15.00/6.95)

Dale McConathy with Diane Vreeland's Hollywood Costume (New York: Abrams, 1976---$35.00)

David Chierichetti's Hollywood Costume Design (New York: Harmony Books/Crown, 1976---$15.00)

Anthony Slide's The Big V: A History of the Vitagraph Company (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1976---$9.00)

Michael G. Fitzgerald's Universal Pictures: A Panoramic History in Words, Pictures and Filmographies (New Rochelle, N.Y.: Arlington House, 1976---$25.00)

James R. Silke's Here's Looking at You, Kid: Fifty Years of Fighting, Working and Dreaming at Warner Brothers (Boston: Little, Brown, 1976---$24.95)

P. Adams Sitney (editorial director), The Essential Cinema: Essays on the Rims in the Collection of Anthology Film Archives (New York: New York University Press, 1976-420.00/ 8.95)

Leo Braudy's The World in a Frame: What We See in Films (New York: Anchor/Doubleday, 1976---$8.95)     

The influence of participants in formative evaluation on the improvement of learning from written instructional materials

Formative evaluation in instructional design is widely advocated as a means to improve instructional materials through tryouts with learners and experts and revision based on this feedback. Research on formative evaluation has sought to prove its effectiveness and to provide guidance as to which methods of collecting feedback and which sources of feedback are most effective in improving learning. It is difficult to determine from the research whether aspects of tryout or of revision are responsible for improved learning. This paper describes a systematic investigation of both tryout and revision to more clearly determine the influence of different formative evaluation participants (experts, learners and revisers) on the improvement of learning from written instructional materials.It was found that revised versions incorporating learner feedback had the most impact on improving learning from the materials. It was also found that revisers have a far more powerful impact on formative evaluation outcomes than was previously supposed, in terms of how they mediate and incorporate the feedback they are given. The results refute contentions that any revision is better than none since versions revised without learner feedback did not improve learning. Implications are discussed.     

General Film Histories

Michael Wood's America in the Movies, or "Santa Maria, It Had Slipped My Mind" (New York: Basic Books, 1975---$10.00)

Adam Garbicz and Jacek Klinowski's Cinema, The Magic Vehicle: A Guide to its Achievement (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1975---$18.50)

Tino Balio's United Artists: The Company Built by the Stars (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1975-- $15.00)

Charles Higham's Warner Brothers (New Y( Scribner's, 1975---$9.95)

John Douglas Eames' The MGM Story: The Complete History of Fifty Roaring Years (New York: Crown, 1975---$25.00)

Rochelle Larkin's Hail, Columbia (New Rochelle, N.Y.: Arlington House, 1975---$17.95)

Datid E. Scherman (ed.) Life Goes to the Movies (New York: Time-Life Books, 1975-- $19.95)

Paul Trent's Those Fabulous Movie Years: The 30s (New York: Crown, 1975---$14.95)

Griffith and Mayer's The Movies (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1969)

Sidney Skolsky's Don't Get Me Wrong-- I Love Hollywood (New York: Putnam's, 1975---$8.95)

Leo Handel's Hollywood Looks at its Audience: A Report of Film Audience Research (originally issued by the University of Illinois Press in 1950)     

E-Government in developing countries: Experiences from sub-Saharan Africa

This article addresses the different institutional and cultural contexts which must be considered when implementing E-Government in sub-Saharan Africa. Although E-Government is a global phenomenon, simply transferring ICT solutions and related organizational concepts from developed to developing countries seems inappropriate. E-Government undoubtedly has the potential to reduce administrative and development problems. However, it is obvious that compared to developed countries, additional effort is necessary when implementing E-Government in developing countries. More than in developed countries, the different initial institutional, cultural, and wider administrative contexts must be considered to avoid unintended effects. It is oversimplifying the issue to merely state that E-Government projects fail in Africa and other developing regions. Although E-Government in African countries lags far behind developed countries, this should be considered more as a state failure or lack of capacity in general. In particular, the different administrative contexts and rationalities must be taken into an account when implementing E-Government projects and strategies. Therefore, especially for African countries, a context-oriented approach seems to be a more promising route to the successful implementation of E-Government. The results of this approach may not seem ambitious from a western perspective, but could contribute to the solution of real-life and development problems in African societies.     

Motor adaptation in complex sports – The influence of visual context information on the adaptation of the three-point shot to altered task demands in expert basketball players

Abstract

We examined the influence of visual context information on skilled motor behaviour and motor adaptation in basketball. The rules of basketball in Europe have recently changed, such that that the distance for three-point shots increased from 6.25 m to 6.75 m. As such, we tested the extent to which basketball experts can adapt to the longer distance when a) only the unfamiliar, new three-point line was provided as floor markings (NL group), or b) the familiar, old three-point line was provided in addition to the new floor markings (OL group). In the present study 20 expert basketball players performed 40 three-point shots from 6.25 m and 40 shots from 6.75 m. We assessed the percentage of hits and analysed the landing position of the ball. Results showed better adaptation of throwing performance to the longer distance when the old three-point line was provided as a visual landmark, compared to when only the new three-point line was provided. We hypothesise that the three-point line delivered relevant information needed to successfully adapt to the greater distance in the OL group, whereas it disturbed performance and ability to adapt in the NL group. The importance of visual landmarks on motor adaptation in basketball throwing is discussed relative to the influence of other information sources (i.e. angle of elevation relative to the basket) and sport practice.     

Acquisition of a complex basketball-dribbling task in school children as a function of bilateral practice order

The purpose of this study was to investigate order-of-practice effects for the acquisition of a complex basketball skill in a bilateral transfer paradigm. The task required participants to dribble as fast as possible in slalom-like movements across six javelins and return to the initial position. Fifty-two right-handed school children (M age = 11.7years) practiced this skill in eight sessions over 4 weeks under one of two training schedules: (a) with the dominant hand, before changing to their nondominant hand (D-ND group), or (b) with the nondominant hand, before changing to the dominant hand (ND-D group). All tests were conducted with the right hand or the left hand only, and a transfer test was given with both hands alternating. The results of a retention test yielded significantly larger learning gains for the ND-D group as compared to the D-ND group. It is interesting that this performance advantage was independent of the respective hand tested. The same pattern of result was found in the transfer test, with significantly shorter movement times for the ND-D group with both hands alternating. Such order-of-practice effects for the acquisition of complex skills can be explained with hemispheric brain asymmetries for the processing of specific task requirements.     

Plasticity of human handedness: Decreased one-hand bias and inter-manual performance asymmetry in expert basketball players

Abstract

Athletes frequently have to adapt their skills to fast changes of play, often requiring the flexible execution of a particular movement skill with either hand. To assess the influence of sport-specific expertise and extensive sport training on human laterality, a video analysis of regular basketball games was performed for professional, semi-professional, and amateur players to investigate how non-dominant hand use and proficiency change with increasing expertise. Our results showed that the right-hand (i.e. dominant hand) bias in basketball players is reduced with increasing expertise (i.e. competitive level). Accordingly, we found that professional players use their non-dominant hand more often and with greater success than semi-professional and amateur players. This was true for most of the basketball-specific skills. Based on these results, we assume that increasing amounts of bilateral practice can lead to a shift in task-specific manual preference towards a higher use of both hands in competition, as well as to a higher proficiency for non-dominant hand actions in particular. From an applied perspective, the more frequent use and higher proficiency of the non-dominant hand in professional basketball players, compared with amateurs, suggests that the context-specific and skilled use of the non-dominant hand is crucial for successful play at higher competitive levels in the sport of basketball.