Examining the Generalization of Error Detection Capabilities as a Function of Athletic Experience

The study of sport specific expertise, and varsity cheerleading, in particular, is rising in competitiveness in recent years. In the motor learning literature, cheerleading has yet to be explored as an athletic experience that may exemplify being an error detection expert. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to determine whether having competitive cheerleading experience would result in superior error detection abilities in a novel force production task. There were 24 participants (12 varsity cheerleaders, 12 non-varsity cheerleaders) who were all female undergraduate university students. An English-Movement Specific Reinvestment Scale revealed the varsity cheerleaders to have greater “movement self-consciousness” compared to the non-varsity cheerleaders F(1, 22) = 6.96, p =.015. For error detection, there was no significant differences between groups. This suggests that the cheerleading group has great movement awareness during their sport; however, this is not a skill that is transferable to a novel error detection task.