THE INFLUENCE OF PRACTICE REGIME ON TACTILE PERCEPTUAL DISCRIMINATIVE ABILITY IN VOLEYBALL, BASKETBALL, AND HANDBALL PLAYERS

Abstract

Understanding the cognitive processes that occur in sports actions, represents an open question for certain research work. The purpose of this study was to assess on real-world contexts the tactile perceptual discriminative capability in volleyball, basketball and handball players, as well as, explored whether some issue related with the athletic performance and practicing regimen, predict aforementioned capacity. The mean differential threshold (DT) of tactile sensation between two measurements was 20.31 ± 8.68 milibar (mb), 19.86 ± 6.21 (mb) and 17.93 ± 12.26 for volleyball, basketball and handball, in that order. No significant differences were found on DT among sport disciplines, with the same trend between measurements. A model of five predictors variable explained 30.4% of the DT variance, consequently a 69.6% may be explained because the influence of other variables not included in the model, or not controlled in the study design either. The mean contribution to the explained variance percentage of DT corresponds to frequency (days) of practicing per week (β = -0.42, t = -2.60; p = .016) and the time (hours) of practicing per day (β = -0.59, t = -2.99, p = .006), the only ones significant DT predictors. The result of the current study suggest that it would release applications to enhance the learning process and performance technical, if it attained reproduce findings by means of causal studies.