The Error Correction Process – A Heuristic Concept

In sport and training situations, augmented feedback is commonly used to improve the performance of athletes. Especially in sports such as artistic gymnastics, figure skating or trampoline gymnastics, coaches use augmented feedback procedures to guide athletes’ attention with the aim of highlighting particular movement errors that occurred in the performance of sport-specific skills. Prior to the generation of a particular feedback the coach (visually) observes and perceives a skill, compares the skill performance at hand with a particular target performance, and detects one or more particular errors as well as their causes. Since the mentioned process highly relies on information from coaches’ visual perception system, factors influencing the visual perception of (sport-specific) skills are likely to influence the error correction process. It is argued, that in particular (a) visual perspective, (b) visual experience, (c) motor experience, (d) coach-athlete interaction, (e) methodical knowledge and (f) biomechanical knowledge influence the error correction process in sports. Evidence on the factors just mentioned is summarized and discussed. Conclusions are drawn and implications for future work are given.