ABSTRACT
As a starting point for this chapter, we pick up a recent theme that practitioners in sport and exercise require a conceptual model of human motor performance as a basis for practical activities in skill (re)acquisition (Handford et al. 1997). A model of the human performer promotes an informed organisation of learning environments and more effective and efficient use of practice and therapy time. A point raised by our treatments of alternative theoretical perspectives on perception and action in earlier chapters is that the standpoint adopted by practitioners strongly influences their beliefs about the learner, the learning environment and the nature of their interaction. A key question, raised in Chapter 7, and reoccurring in the motor learning literature under different guises, concerns how the perceptual information to support actions changes with learning. In this chapter, we selectively examine some of the main implications from the traditional and ecological theories of perception and action for the acquisition of movement skill in sport contexts.
