The Effect of Social-Comparative Feedback on Acquisition and Consolidation of a Perceptual-Motor Skill

Abstract

The aim of this study was to determine the effect of social-comparative feedback on acquisition and consolidation of a perceptual-motor skill in high school male students. In this study, 36 high school students as the sample were randomly assigned to three groups (each group 12 subjects): positive, negative and veridical social-comparative feedback. Pretest scores were recorded. Acquisition phase lasted five days and each subjects daily performed 10 blocks of 3 trials of badminton long serve. After each block, they received the feedback of their mean scores in the form of positive (higher than the actual score), negative (lower than the actual score) and veridical (the actual score) given the group to which they belonged. After 72 hours of detraining, consolidation test was performed under the same conditions as the pretest. After determining the data normality and homogeneity of variances, ANOVA with repeated measures, one-way ANOVA and Tukey post hoc test were used to analyze data at the significance level of P≤0.05. The results showed that training improved the performance of groups in the acquisition phase. But there was no significant difference in the performance of the groups. The consolidation of positive feedback group was significantly better than the other groups. These findings suggest that positive social-comparative feedback affects the consolidation of a perceptual-motor skill such as targeted badminton long serve skill.

Keywords

• acquisition
• badminton serve
• consolidation
• motivational feedback
• perceptual-motor skill
• social-comparative feedback