ABSTRACT
Two complementary but fundamentally different approaches can be employed when attempting to understand how skill in sport is acquired. One approach, which has been the historically dominant one within the motor learning field, involves tracing the development of particular skills and control processes in untrained participants as they are given carefully controlled schedules (and combinations) of practice, instruction and feedback (e.g., Adams, 1987; Schmidt & Lee, 2011). Such an approach can be instructive with respect to changes that occur early in the learning process although the (relatively) short-term nature of the practice interventions that are achievable under typical laboratory conditions, and the generally simplistic nature of the skills that have been examined in this way, can make inference to skill learning as it occurs in the sport domain problematic. The alternative approach – the expertise approach – involves making comparisons between experts in the sports domain with less skilled and less highly practiced individuals. These contrasts, from different ends of the skill spectrum, can be used both to ascertain the nature of the expert advantage and to identify the key processes that are refined and modified as a functional adaptation to years of practice and domain-specific experience (e.g., Abernethy, Burgess-Limerick, & Parks, 1994; Starkes & Ericsson, 2003).
