Internal and External Imagery Perspective Measurement and Use in Imagining Open and Closed Sports Skills: An Exploratory Study
Summary (4 min read)
Imagery Perspective Measurement and Open and Closed Sports Skills 3
- Research has shown that imagery is an effective performance enhancement tool and is one of the psychological skills that sports psychologists and athletes use most (Murphy & Martin, 2002; Morris, Spittle, & Perry, 2004; Morris, Spittle, & Watt, 2005) .
- Internal imagery involves the person imagining being inside their body and experiencing those sensations that might occur while performing in the real situation.
Measurement of Imagery Perspective Use
- The development of appropriate measures of imagery perspective has been limited, consequently the measurement of imagery perspective use has been problematic, with many studies simply assigning participants to perspective training groups and assuming that they used the assigned perspective, or assigning participants to groups based on self-reported preferences.
- The correlations between the CV, RV, and RS were all above .9, indicating a large effect size and a very high level of agreement between the three state measurement techniques.
- The only comments consistently made were that CV seemed to slightly slow down the imagery process, but that it did not change how participants imaged.
- To measure imagery perspective accurately, the results of this exploratory study suggest that a specific state measure, e.g., CV, RS, or RV, is more appropriate than a general questionnaire.
- Thus, there has been a Imagery Perspective Measurement and Open and Closed Sports Skills 16 problem with ensuring the success of independent variable manipulation in the imagery literature.
Imagery Perspective Measurement and Open and Closed Sports Skills 4
- There have been two main types of measure of imagery perspective use (Morris, et al., 2005) .
- Trait measures use words like "usually", "generally", or "typically", because they are not focusing on specific events requiring temporal orientation or limitation, e.g., the Imagery Use Questionnaire (IUQ; Hall, Rodgers, & Barr, 1990) .
- Retrospective reports are subject to memory lapses as well as spontaneous reconstruction of events or processes based on known outcomes (Anderson, 1981; Brewer, Van Raalte, Linder, & Van Raalte, 1991) .
- Thus, a concurrent technique may provide a viable option for measuring imagery perspective use during imagery by providing an account of cognitive processing at the time it occurs, rather than retrospectively (Morris, et al., 2005) .
Imagery Perspective Use
- Most research on imagery perspectives has focused on the influence of perspective on an outcome variable, such as performance, rather than focusing on which perspective participants use.
- Some researchers have reported that the performance of different types of tasks was affected differently by the perspectives, with external imagery producing greater gains on one task and internal imagery on another (e.g., White & Hardy, 1995; Glisky, Williams, & Kihlstrom, 1996; Hardy & Callow, 1999) , but these have not investigated perspective use.
- In imagery of the eight sports skills, participants also reported using more internal imagery than Imagery Perspective Measurement and Open and Closed Sports Skills 17 external imagery.
- This also seems to coincide with the child development literature on perspective-taking, which suggests that the ability to take on the observer's perspective is not something the authors are born with, but needs to be developed (Epley, et al., 2004; Piaget, 1959; Rigal, 1996) .
- Participants reported use of external imagery on the IUQ and during imagery trials, so external imagery, although not the default, may add something new and different to the imagery experience (Cox, 2002 : Morris, et al., 2004) or add to the useful information that is otherwise available (Hardy, 1997) .
Skill Type and Imagery Perspective Use
- Several psychologists (Harris, 1986; McLean & Richardson, 1994; Annett, 1995) have suggested that closed skills might benefit more from internal imagery, whereas open skills might benefit most from external imagery.
- For that reason, this exploratory study had two major aims.
- The second major aim was to examine patterns of internal and external imagery perspective use during imagery of a variety of sports skills.
- This pattern of use does not seem to support the suggestion of several researchers (e.g., Harris, 1986; McLean & Richardson, 1994) , who have proposed that learning and performance of closed skills would benefit more from an internal perspective, whereas open skills should benefit from an external perspective.
Participants
- This exploratory study involved 23 male participants and 18 female participants with sporting experience, aged between 14 and 28, with a mean age of 19.4 years (SD = 3.12).
- Participants were recruited from undergraduate classes in human movement and physical education, and local sporting teams.
- Eleven participants reported they played cricket, six played netball, five played basketball, three played Australian Rules Football, three were rowers, two were swimmers, and two were triathletes.
- There was one participant in each of the following activities: calisthenics, surfing, baseball, judo, soccer, running, recreation, 400 m running, and Australian Football League (AFL) umpiring.
Measures
- Concurrent Verbalisation (CV) -This describes the process where individuals verbalise the information they are attending to and their conscious cognitive processes at the time when they are consciously attending to a process.
- Instructions for CV, given before imagery, emphasised describing everything experienced while performing the imagery, with special emphasis on reporting whether the participants experienced the imagery from inside or outside the body.
- The CV was recorded on audiotape and transcribed later.
- Two independent raters scored the transcripts from CV for percentage of internal and external imagery.
Imagery Task
- Participants were required to imagine performing eight sports skills.
- Four of these skills were classified as open skills and four were classified as closed skills.
- Instructions for imagery of these skills emphasised creating as realistic an imagery experience as possible, describing the use of different sense modalities and the experience of emotions.
- Instructions were not provided that would encourage the use of either imagery perspective.
- The open skills participants imagined were hitting a tennis ball back over the net, defending against an attack in a team ball game, catching a ball thrown when not knowing to which side it would be thrown, and dodging a ball unexpectedly thrown at the person.
Procedure
- Participants were recruited from undergraduate classes in sports psychology and local sporting teams.
- After providing informed consent, participants completed the IUQ to assess typical use of imagery perspective.
- Participants imagined for two trials on each of four open and four closed skills.
- During imagery of the skills, CV was recorded.
- Finally, participants answered a series of debriefing questions.
Data Analysis
- Pearson product moment correlation co-efficients were calculated among the imagery perspective measures (IUQ, CV, RS, and RV) to determine the similarity of Imagery Perspective Measurement and Open and Closed Sports Skills 12 these measures for assessing perspective use.
- Then an independent samples t-test was conducted on the IUQ imagery perspective items to assess general reported imagery perspective use.
- Descriptive statistics were compared on CV, RS and RV for internal and external imagery use during the imagery of the sports skills to assess actual imagery use on imagery trials and differences between imagery perspective use on the individual sports skills.
- Finally, analysis of variance was conducted on scores on the CV, RS, and RV to determine any differences between perspective use for all the open skills compared to all the closed skills.
Concurrent Verbalisation (CV), Retrospective Verbalisation (RV), and Rating
- Scores from CV, RV, and RS, averaged for the two trials for each skill are summarised in Table 2 .
- The scores for the RS are also presented in Figure 1 to highlight the variation between scores on individual skills.
- Possible scores range from 0 to 100, with a low score indicating more internal imagery and a high score indicating more external imagery.
- Results indicated that, for every skill, participants experienced more internal imagery than external imagery.
- The sports skills with the lowest scores, indicating the most internal imagery content, were hitting a tennis ball back over the net and catching a ball thrown at you when not knowing to which side it would be thrown.
This indicates variability between the responses of different participants for the same
- Imagery Perspective Measurement and Open and Closed Sports Skills 14 skill, probably due to participants reporting either high internal or high external imagery content, with few rating moderate amounts of internal and external imagery for each skill.
- The means for the four open and the four closed skills were both below 50, indicating that participants experienced more internal imagery than external imagery in both skill types.
Discussion
- The perspective adopted during imagery affects the imagery experience and may mediate the relationship between imagery and learning or performance effects (Morris, et al., 2005) .
- The measurement of imagery perspective use in the past has been limited to sporadic use of retrospective approaches, with limited development of appropriate tools.
- In this exploratory study the measurement of internal and external imagery perspective use was investigated with several state and trait measurement approaches to assist in the development of appropriate imagery perspective measures.
- To aid in the development of knowledge related to the role of imagery perspectives in imagination of sports skills, patterns of internal and external imagery perspective Imagery Perspective Measurement and Open and Closed Sports Skills 15 use during imagery of a variety of sports skills were also examined.
- A range of open and closed skills were compared, based on the hypothesis that the type of task, open or closed, might affect imagery perspective use (e.g., Harris & Robinson, 1986; McLean & Richardson, 1994; Morris, et al., 2005) .
Methodological Issues
- In the present study, a higher use of internal imagery overall was found.
- The study does not provide information on which perspective is more effective for performance enhancement of these skills.
- Thus, research is needed to investigate internal and external training effects on performance.
- If participants were given more descriptive detail of the event and also the event was made more realistic or of a longer duration, then imagery perspective use patterns may differ.
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Citations
65 citations
Cites background from "Internal and External Imagery Persp..."
...Spittle and Morris (2007) reported no significant difference between imagery perspectives in open and closed sports skills, although the use of external imagery during imagery of closed skills tended to be higher than that during imagery of open skills....
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57 citations
Cites background or methods from "Internal and External Imagery Persp..."
...Because perspective switching is a phenomenon known to occur (Gordon, Weinberg, & Jackson, 1994), it is important to monitor whether clients hold the perspective they are instructed to use (Spittle & Morris, 2007)....
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...Scores ranged from 0 to 100; lower scores indicated more internal imagery use, and higher scores indicated more external imagery use (Spittle & Morris, 2007)....
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...When using an external perspective, clients imagine performing the movements from the perspective of being outside their body; thus, they imagine being an observer of themselves in motion (Spittle & Morris, 2007)....
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...…use, one rater (D. Nilsen) scored the four individual retrospective verbalization transcripts for the percentage of internal and external imagery used according to previously established methods (Spittle & Morris, 2007), and we calculated the mean of the four scores for each participant....
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...…and to score The American Journal of Occupational Therapy 323 Downloaded From: http://ajot.aota.org/pdfaccess.ashx?url=/data/journals/ajot/929907/ on 06/17/2017 Terms of Use: http://AOTA.org/terms a perspective rating scale to determine which perspective they had used (see Spittle & Morris, 2007)....
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44 citations
Cites background or methods from "Internal and External Imagery Persp..."
...…have focused on perspective and functional use of imagery in different types of sport skills (Arvinen-Barrow et al., 2007; Fogarty & Morris, 2003; Spittle & Morris, 2007; Watt et al., 2008), but very limited research (e.g., Spittle, 2001) has addressed the effect of imagery perspectives on…...
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...Also, according to Spittle and Morris (2007), a rating scale was used to control the relative time spent using internal and external perspectives during the imagery trials, using a 10-cm analogue scale, anchored at each end by 100% internal/0% external and the other end by 100% external/0% internal....
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...This study followed prior researchers’ recommendations (Spittle, 2001; Spittle & Morris, 2007) to control for: (a) imagery ability and perspective preference in the assignment of participants to groups; (b) such moderator variables as age, gender, competitive level, and sport type; (c) having…...
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...Similarly, in studying imagery perspective use of eight common sports skills (i.e., four open skills and four closed skills), Spittle and Morris (2007) found that imagery perspective use did not differ for open or closed skills, but imagers showed greater use of internal imagery while imagining the…...
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30 citations
Cites background from "Internal and External Imagery Persp..."
...Classic dance can be considered an artistic performance requiring closed skills, for which the environment is relatively constant and the activity is often self-paced ( Spittle & Morris, 2007 )....
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23 citations
Cites background from "Internal and External Imagery Persp..."
...When discussing imagery of open skills, Spittle and Morris (2007) suggested that it is difficult for a person to produce images of the unexpected....
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References
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