In motor learning, how a target skill is learned is important, and performance results vary depending on practice-related factors. Motor skills, which are classified as closed skills, are typically practiced through self-paced repetition. However, learning a target-following task performed alone may be facilitated by intervention from another person. Therefore, we considered an environment with disturbances such as open skills, even for a closed-skill learning activity such as a golf putting task, and expected that learning would be promoted in an environment with high uncertainty. In this study, we developed an idea based on several previous studies, and examined the effects of the practice of "catching and hitting a ball launched from ball launchers." The participants were four golf novices, two of whom practiced a conventional putting style as the control group. The participants practiced 10 times over a month, during which they took a pretest, midterm test, and posttest. Subsequently, the participants were challenged with two tasks. The participants practiced with approximately 1,000 balls during the study. To evaluate their performance, we used a motion capture device to measure the orientation of their body, kinematics of the putter head, and final ball positions. To measure participants’ sight lines, we proposed a method that utilizes a local coordinate system to efficiently represent and estimate the movement of points. From the results of the sight line analysis using this method, we understood the problems of novices’ alignment (aligning the putter head and body for the target). In addition, we were able to determine how long it takes for golf novices to acquire their approximate movement patterns and the number of days that the absolute error of the final ball position can be kept within 0.2 m ~ 0.4 m. We discuss the impact and future possibilities of incorporating elements of open skills to improve golf-putting skills.
Hasegawa et al. (Fri,) studied this question.