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Exploring the right spot : how much information really to explore for efficient climbing?
Author
Ding, Yifei
Supervisor
Komar, John
Chow, Jia Yi
Abstract
This study examined how information volume affected the way climbers of each expertise level anticipated future actions in sport climbing. The experiment purpose is to understand how information could be curated specifically for learners to promote safe exploration and effective skill acquisition. There were 3 experimental conditions designed for this study where 1, 3 or 5 consecutive usable climbing holds were visible for each condition respectively. Electronic climbing holds were installed to enable the researcher to control the number of usable climbing holds that were visible to the climbers for each condition. Every participant of the expert (n = 8) and beginner groups (n = 10) was instructed to climb to the best of their abilities for all the conditions. All participants completed all 3 conditions. An open source software, Kinovea analysed the video footages of each ascent and obtained the coordinates of the participants’ hip trajectory projection on the 2D wall by tracking the climber’s hip in the video recordings. From the video footages, 5 performance indicators were measured (geometric index of entropy (GIE), hip immobility percentage, climbing speed, hand touches and foot touches) to determine how well future actions were anticipated. GIE is used to indicate climb fluency where a low GIE value represents a fluent climb. Climbing efficiency has been defined as achieving “fluidity”, or “fluency” in climbing movements, which is identified by a regular movement without saccades. A two-way repeated measures ANOVA test compared the 5 performance indicators between the groups and participants. Climb fluency improved only in the expert groups when more information was available. For all the three conditions, mean GIE values were significantly lower for the expert group compared to the beginner group (condition 1 hold: beginner = 1.330, expert = 0.955; condition 3 holds: beginner = 1.247, expert = 0.747; condition 5 holds: beginner = 1.326, expert = 0.774). There was no main effect on climbing speed, hand touches and foot touches when more information was made available to both groups. Informational constraints can be applied to focus the learners’ exploration on relevant areas and to constraint the amount of variability. Beginners and experts varied in their abilities to gather information in their environment to execute performatory actions. Therefore, information level should be specific to the learner’s expertise level to promote safe exploration and skill acquisition.
Date Issued
2020
Call Number
GV200 Din
Date Submitted
2020