Effects of attentional focus and cognitive load on novice dart throwing: Evidence from quiet eye duration and pupillary responses.

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the effects of attentional focus and cognitive-load on motor performance, quiet-eye-duration, and pupil dilation. 18 participants completed a dart throwing task under four conditions, internal or external focus with high or low cognitive-load. Cognitive-load was created by a secondary tone detection task. During each trial participants pupil size and eye movements were recorded along with accuracy data of the dart throw. Results revealed that decreased cognitive-load increased accuracy while high load increased pupil size (p's < 0.05). An external focus resulted in the greatest accuracy while an external focus with high cognitive-load resulted in the longest quiet-eye-durations (p's < 0.05). Based on these findings an increase in pupil size is related to greater cognitive-load but doesn't explain the improvement in task performance. Likewise, an external focus of attention improved performance but was not strongly related to quiet-eye-duration. Results are further discussed in the article.

Design and psychometrics evaluation of Adolescent Physical Literacy Questionnaire (APLQ).

Purpose: Despite the global introduction of physical literacy in recent years, a lack of a comprehensive physical literacy tool is still evident in adolescents. This study was conducted to design and perform psychometric evaluation of self-assessment adolescent physical literacy questionnaire in the Iranian sample. Methods: A mixed research method, including 3 phases, was used on 836 adolescents in the age range of 12-18 years old. A questionnaire with 59 items was designed based on the qualitative stage, refined during the validity and reliability stages, and finally, formed a questionnaire with 25 items. Results: The exploratory factor analysis showed 3 factors with an explanation of 59.5% of the total variance, and the results of confirmatory factor analysis confirmed the 3-factor model. Results also showed good internal consistency (α = 0.951), retest reliability (0.981-0.837), and concurrent validity of the questionnaire with the PPLI instrument (0.680-0.790). Conclusion: The results showed good validity and reliability of the Adolescent Physical Literacy Questionnaire (APLQ) with 3 dimensions. Therefore, it can be a suitable tool to assess adolescent physical literacy. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11332-021-00818-8.