A serial-position curve in high-performance darts: The effect of visuomotor calibration on throwing accuracy
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ORIGINAL ARTICLE
A serial‑position curve in high‑performance darts: The effect of visuomotor calibration on throwing accuracy Fabian Wunderlich1 · Herbert Heuer2 · Philip Furley1 · Daniel Memmert1 Received: 10 September 2018 / Accepted: 30 May 2019 © Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2019
Abstract The aim of the present research was to test if the fine-tuning of skilled motor actions benefits from proximate previous actions via a visuomotor calibration process. In professional darts, each player cycles through different activities: three darts are thrown with a rather smooth sequence of movements, the darts are retrieved from the dartboard, the other player throws his or her darts and retrieves them, the next three darts are thrown, retrieved, etc. We hypothesized that these cycles give rise to a serial-position curve for the precision of darts as a result of a particular kind of warm-up decrement. Even though the interruptions of actually throwing darts are only in the order of seconds, walking away from the throw line should lead to a loss of fine-tuning of the calibration of movement parameters with respect to targets defined in the external frame of reference of the dartboard. For the players of the 2017 Professional Darts Corporation World Darts Championship (N = 36,168 scores) we confirmed that the first dart of a series of three is indeed less accurate than the subsequent two. This warm-up decrement is particularly pronounced for vertical errors, for which the relation to movement parameters is more complex than for horizontal errors. Fine-tuning of visuomotor calibration is a neglected facet of warm-up that is also important for various other sports such as tennis, basketball, handball, and football.
Introduction Playing darts involves a cycle of different activities. In a match between two players, three darts are thrown by the one player and retrieved from the dartboard. Then three darts are thrown by the other player (which is referred to as a throw in darts terminology) and retrieved from the dartboard. Thus, each player throws a series of three darts one after the other (an individual dart throw is referred to as dart in darts terminology) before this rather smooth sequence of movements is interrupted by retrieving his or her darts from the dartboard and by the other player throwing his or her darts and retrieving them. This cycle is repeated for each player until one of them reaches a predefined score. Pertinent to the present research, there is reason to hypothesize that this * Fabian Wunderlich f.wunderlich@dshs‑koeln.de 1
Institute of Exercise Training and Sport Informatics, German Sport University Cologne, Am Sportpark Müngersdorf 6, 50933 Cologne, Germany
Leibniz Research Centre for Working Environment and Human Factors, Ardeystraße 67, 44139 Dortmund, Germany
2
cycle of throwing, being interrupted, throwing, etc., might go along with periodic variations of the precision of the darts. Here we show the existence of such variations in highperformance darts, specif
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