Practice Effect In Motor Skill Learning And Visual Imagery Cognitive Process

Visual-spatial cognitive impairment is an important component of human intelligent structure. It plays very important roles in fields of aerospace, machine and architecture design, mapping, sports, as well as people's daily life. Spatial cognition processes different visual information with visual-spatial imagery as its center. Motor skills, such as writing, running, riding, operating, refer to the various behavioral exercises in learning, sports, laboring, etc. Since it relates to both basic and advanced activities of human being's, motor skill is crucial to human lives. Learning and mastery of it is very important in the field of sports, as it is the key factor that influences the performance an athlete's.Researches in the past years have proved that imagery training is crucial to sports skill learning. However it is still not clear whether or not the visual-spatial ability of athletes' influences the efficient completion of imagery training? Do practice effects emerge after long-term of systematic training? All these questions were not answered yet. The present research exploratively studied the relation between sports skill learning and visual imagery cognitive process, and tried to provide support to personnel selection in some sports programs with psychological theories.This research consistsof two parts. The first part is the test measuring, which employed the visual-spatial ability test of the cognitive literality battery developed by H. Gordon in 1986. The second part employed two experiments, mental rotation and motion-extrapolation, which were programmed with E-Prime. All the subjects were athletes of nationally second class and above, they were separated into three groups according to their professions. Among all the subjects, only athletes of the middle-distance race group did not receive any imagery training ever.The present research supports conclusions as follows:1. In the CLB test of the three groups of athletes, significant differences does not exist between the total grade and the mark of a single test.2. In mental rotation test of the three groups of athletes, the reaction time and the correct rate between the Wushu group and the football group does not differ significantly.3. Athletes of the Wushu group and the football group are much better than athletes of the middle-distance race group in the mental rotation test.4. There is no significant difference in the test of motion-extrapolation among all the tree group of athletes.