The Role of Focus of Attention in Elite Wheelchair Curling Athletes: a mixed methods study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Elite Canadian wheelchair curling athletes (N=6) delivered two throw types (draw/takeout) with two handle variations (in-turn/out-turn). A mixed-method approach was utilized to investigate three focus of attention (FOA) conditions: 1) control; 2) internal focus; and 3) external focus. The experimental component addressed FOA and performance accuracy. Vision and hearing were occluded once the stone passed the first hog-line to prevent feedback and learning across trials. Draw end-point accuracy from the button was measured via radial and constant error. Takeout accuracy was measured via dichotic response (hit or miss a target stone). There were 3 trials per condition, totalling 36 throws. Individual descriptive statistics (mean, median, and standard deviation) were reported. To compare the within participant effect between FOA conditions, Wilcoxen ranked paired sample t-tests were applied with an effect size expressed by a ranked biserial correlation. Open-ended questions investigated curlers FOA preference at baseline and again post-delivery. A thematic analysis was conducted for open-ended questions. No one ideal focus per curler was determined quantitatively. Depending on the individual different throws and the different handles had different foci that improved the performance of that specific throwing condition. Individualization should be considered. Post-experiment focus preference favoured an external focus. Although, the importance of ‘feel’ was highlighted. Curlers discussed the importance of ‘feeling’ especially for draws which they ascribe to an internal focus. “Feel” as applied in curling more likely reflects a holistic focus. Educating about a holistic focus compared to other FOA language may be crucial in future studies.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.021 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".