ABSTRACT
The capacity, competence, faculty, quality, or power that enables a person to achieve something with no further learning or training at a particular moment in a particular place is ability, or an ability, which is derived from the Latin habilitas for able. Ability is always contextdependent: because someone has ability to accomplish an action in one CONTEXT carries no implication that he or she can duplicate the same action in another. Coaches are often said to lose their ability to motivate players; yet, they often move to different clubs at which they regain that ability. Ability also waxes and wanes, increasing and decreasing in time. The ability to run a sub-three-hour marathon might be positively correlated to the amount of high-quality training. Over the years, that ability declines, regardless of the amount or quality of training. In sport and exercise psychology, ability is frequently prefixed, as
in, for example, George Rebok and Dana Plude’s study of physical activity and memory in AGING adults, which included cognitive ability among its measures. By contrast, Molly Moran and Maureen Weiss assessed athletic ability and its links with various other characteristics. (Both studies used SELF-RATING as a method.) Aptitude, while often used interchangeably with TALENT, is actually
a potential to perform: latent qualities that might be developed into ability given the right conditions for training or learning. Without those conditions, aptitude might remain undeveloped.
