Executive Summary
Paper’s Purpose
The purpose of the paper was to investigate how team members’ portrayal of team strategies and plays improved over time when a team action imagery training intervention was put into place. It also aimed to see how imagery training improved long-term memory in team athletes.
Methods
There were 24 futsal players who were randomly assigned either an ‘imagery training group’ or a ‘no imagery training group’, and underwent a pretest phase, a 4-week intervention, and a posttest phase. During the 4-week intervention, they would be given options on what team strategy would be best to attempt in regard to interacting with other teammates, and then were asked to mentally rehearse the strategy 10 times.
Results
The results showed that participants in the imagery training group were able to relate different team strategies and plays together, and their practical understanding of the strategical plays became more similar to those of expert players.
127 our experts are availableright now
Paper’s Conclusions
The paper concluded that if mental rehearsal of team strategies is implemented in team training, the team will be able to perform much more cohesively and have a better understanding of how to coordinate more effectively with teammates. It also concluded that mental rehearsal improves strategical action portrayal in long-term memory.
Strengths
The field of interest with team action imagery was quite novel, and the researchers were very effective in choosing not only a type of mental imagery that hadn’t been studied before (i.e. team imagery), but also being able to link it to long-term memory, which also hadn’t been studied frequently. The imagery tests in the beginning of the method was also a strength that was able to rule out who could participate in the study.
Weaknesses
The 4-week intervention phase was too short of a time to see more distinct differences in portrayal of strategies between the “imagery training” and “no imagery training” groups, and the definition of an “expert player” was, in my opinion, not clearly defined so it was hard to understand what they were comparing the results to.
Applicability / Relevance
Team action imagery training can be related to group dances, such as a modern dance organization that I was involved in, because performing a group dance requires teamwork and understanding the different movements that you need to perform with a partner/s. This imagery training can be applied in dance routines by having each dancer mentally rehearse their partner work, as well as where they need to be on stage, in order to create a more cohesive dance routine.
Detailed Summary
Paper’s Purpose
The purpose of the paper was to account for the discrepancy in sport psychology research on team action imagery training, as it has seldom been studied by researchers. Imagery training is essentially a mental visualization of what an athlete intends to perform. Much of the research on imagery training and how it benefits athletes has focused on individual actions in sports, but there is little knowledge on how this type of mental training can benefit team sports in terms of cohesive performance. Therefore, the researchers in this paper aimed to look into how team members’ portrayal of team strategies progressed over time when team action imagery training was introduced as part of their training program.
Essentially, they wanted to see if having players mentally rehearse the team plays before practice would lead to more cohesive and effective team performances, as well as lead players to have a better portrayal of strategies in their long-term memory. A player’s mental rehearsal of team strategies would include visualizing the other players’ that they needed to interact with. The researchers were also interested to see if the portrayal of offensive and defensive strategies in “skilled” players became any more similar to that of “expert” players, meaning if their thoughts on strategical plays became any more intricate.
Methods
There were 24 collegiate futsal players that took part in the study, who all practiced once a week, and they were randomly assigned to either a group that took part in imagery training, or a group that did not take part in imagery training (the control). The pretest consisted of familiarizing the participants with the split procedure, where a game play is permanently shown on a screen and then other plays are shown next to it and players have to say whether the same team strategy would be used for both plays. There was then an intervention where the imagery training was actually put to use.
There were 4 weeks of intervention, where players were first familiarized with the imagery training and followed a script on how to visualize during the first week. For the following 3 weeks, players would have imagery training twice a week where they would be given a game play and then have to choose the best strategical option to tackle this play in regard to working with other teammates. After choosing the best option for the team, they would go off individually and mentally rehearse the play in their heads. The posttest required participants to repeat the split procedure.
Results
In futsal, like many other sports, there are defensive and offensive strategies that a team learns in order to perform better during competition. For the mental representation section of the results, it was found that participants grouped together offensive and defensive strategies separately in the pretest, and there was no change across either of the groups from pretest to posttest in terms of how the participants viewed these offensive and defensive team strategies. However, when the experimental and control group were compared, participants in the experimental group who went through imagery training improved much more in their ability to connect and relate different team strategies and plays, rather than just having knowledge on what the strategies are. Because of this ability to relate different strategies to each other, it was found that players in the experimental group became more similar to “expert” players in their ability to have an intricate portrayal and broadened understanding of the strategical concepts.
Paper’s Conclusions
The paper concluded that if players in a particular team sport regularly engage in mentally rehearsing team strategies that include their plays and interactions with other teammates, it will lead to a much better understanding of how to coordinate more effectively and efficiently with their teammates, which will ultimately lead to more a more cohesive team performance. It also concluded that consistent visualization of team plays can lead to better strategical action portrayal in long-term memory. The conclusion also stated that more research needs to be completed in order to fully understand which types of interventions work the best for improving the success of team sports.
Critique of Paper
Paper’s Strength’s
The purpose of the research paper was one of the key strengths that stood out to me while reading. The researchers of the paper did extensive background research on motor imagery training and they knew specifically which athletic populations had undergone imagery training interventions and what the results were. Because of their extensive background research into this topic, they explicitly knew which athletic population they needed to target (team sports), and what question they needed to answer with their research. Because they were well aware of the results of the previous experiments done, they decided to test the effects of imagery training on long-term memory as they noted that this had not previously been tested before, which made their paper novel.
Another strength of the paper that added to the credibility as a whole was the ‘Methods’ section, where participants had to undergo a manipulation check and imagery testing before they participated in the study. This was to ensure that participants were mentally capable of vividly creating and rehearsing images, as well as ensuring that participants were able to follow instructions. If the participants were not able to vividly rehearse a task in their mind, they would not be able to participate in the study because it would lead to inaccurate results. A final strength of the paper was that for each section of the methods (i.e. manipulation check, imagery testing), there was a quantitative test that analyzed the results of each section. The mean and standard deviation for the imagery training group were calculated for each of these tests which strengthened the quantitative results, as well as the comparative analysis of the study.
Paper’s Weaknesses
One of the only weaknesses of this paper that truly stood out to me was the researchers’ definition of an “expert” player. One of the main purposes of this research was to see if skilled players’ portrayal and understanding of team strategies and plays became any closer to that of “expert” players. However, there was not much explanation on what constituted an “expert” player, and what exactly was the difference between a “skilled” and “expert” player, which left me confused as to what exactly they were comparing the results to.
Another weakness of the study came from the methods section, where team action imagery training was only practiced for 4 weeks, with one of those weeks being an introduction to how imagery training worked. I think that the study should have lasted an entire training season instead of just 4 weeks, because following a team through an entire training season with an imagery training intervention may have yielded a more substantial difference between the imagery training and no imagery training groups.
Are the author’s interpretations justified? Why or why not
The author’s interpretations are justified because they reference many different studies throughout the discussion that positively correlate with their findings. Specifically, they compare their own findings with that of Lex et al. (2015) to justify their interpretation that skilled futsal players have their own depiction of offensive and defensive strategies and are able to categorize these into different groups. Because there was not much research done on the topic of team action imagery training, the results had to be interpreted such that they stated that imagery training is able to shift the skilled futsal player’s portrayal of team strategies closer to that of an expert.
This interpretation was justified through the analysis of Lex et al. (2015), where physical practice was able to lead to a better portrayal of team strategies. The researchers also acknowledged that there is still a lot to be discovered about team action imagery training and its effects on team performance, and they gave many recommendations on what future studies could assess moving forward in order to discover more answers about how imagery training can improve both team performance and individual motor performance.
Relevance & Applicability
Your organization
The organization that I was involved in was modern and jazz dance back home in Barbados. While I don’t currently dance anymore, I was very active in the dancing community when I was younger, so I know a lot about what is required in order to perform with a lot of people on a stage. With both jazz and modern, there is typically an instructor who choreographs a dance for an entire class to perform together. We had around 20 people in the class for modern dance, and we always had a show at the end of the year to showcase our talent to the public.
Relevance of Results to your organization
While dancing may not seem like a “team sport” to many, when it comes time to learn specific dances with 19 other people where you have to interact not only physically but emotionally with one another, it definitely becomes and feels much like a team sport. A lot of the dances that we performed required partner work, as well as a cohesive team effort to make the entire dance look put together and well-rehearsed. Therefore, the results of the previous study are very much relevant to group dances. The results of the study showed that team action imagery training can help team members relate strategical plays that they have learned with other plays, as well as give them a better understanding of how to actively coordinate plays with their teammates. Because dancing in groups is heavily reliant on timing and rhythm, being able to visualize how you interact with your partner/s while dancing can improve the cohesiveness of a dance routine as a whole.
How can results be utilized
With the knowledge that team action imagery training has a substantial impact on improving the cohesiveness of team performance and helping performers understand their teammates actions better, this can greatly benefit all of the modern and jazz dance organizations around the world. Specifically, it can be utilized to help the dance organization that I was involved in back home because it would educate the instructors and dancers on the importance of not only physically rehearsing the dances every day for weeks leading up to the end of year performance, but also focusing on the mental aspect of the dance routine. Once dancers are aware of the benefits of both mental and physical rehearsal, we would be able to see a much more cohesive and rhythmic dance routine at shows, as well as a broader understanding of our partner/s actions in relation to ours.
How your idea could be implemented
The idea of team action imagery training could be implemented at my dance studio back home by having all dancers taking part in the performance spend 30 minutes every day visualizing their interactions with their partner/s, as well as visualizing their placement on stage and who they need to be in front of or behind during certain aspects of the performance. They could mentally rehearse 30 minutes every day for 5 weeks leading up to the performance. I think that once their interactions with every other dancer on stage is visualized for these 5 weeks, the performance will turn out to be much more cohesive because each dancer will have a deeper understanding for the specific movements needed to be carried out with their partner/s, thus leading to fewer errors and more rhythm during the performance.
