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Empirical literature addressing the effectiveness of self-talk for expert performers is lacking. We addressed this shortcoming within the existent literature and examined the comparative effects of instructional and motivational self-talk on basketball free throw shooting accuracy and salient movement kinematics. We recruited 20 professional basketball players to participate in a 2 x 2 pre/post-test experiment. Free throw accuracy and movement patterns were recorded, with the latter subsequently used to calculate elbow-wrist coordination variability. Results indicated superior shooting accuracy and reduced movement coordination variability for instructional self-talk compared to baseline conditions, whereas no differences emerged for motivational self-talk. Findings from the study help practitioners to better guide skilled performers how best to use self-talk; an area in urgent need of further research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The quiet eye is a characteristic of highly skilled perceptual and motor performance that is considered as the final fixation toward a target before movement initiation. The aim of this study was to extend quiet eye–related knowledge by investigating expertise effects on overall quiet eye duration among expert and near-expert basketball players, as well as to determine the relative contribution of early and late visual information in a basketball jump shot by comparing the timing components of quiet eye duration (early and late quite eye). Twenty-seven expert and near-expert male basketball players performed the jump shots. Gaze was recorded with the SensoMotoric Instruments eye tracking glasses and shooting performance accuracy was evaluated by scoring each shot on a scale of 1–8. Six infrared cameras circularly arranged around the participants were used to collect the kinematic information of the players. The performance accuracy, gaze behavior, and kinematic characteristics of the participants during the test were calculated. The experts with longer quiet eye duration had better performance in a basketball jump shot compared to the near-experts. Also the experts had longer early and late quiet eye duration than the near-experts. The results revealed a relationship between quiet eye duration and performance. The combined visual strategy is a more efficient strategy in complex far-aiming tasks such as a basketball jump shot. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]