Skill shapes functional movement variability and exploration tendencies: the effect of skill under changing environmental constraints on the emergence of creative action in a divergent kickboxing task

Abstract

Creative actions are both functional and unique, furnishing significant performance advantages in sport. We examined the proposition that the occurrence of creative actions has a common behavioural mechanism, exploration, that is driven by motor skill. Using a kickboxing task, we assessed the effect of skill on the degree of uniqueness and functionality of striking actions, which were determined using full body kinematic data and measures of peak impact force respectively. We expected that, since the task was designed to stimulate exploration (by varying the body-scaled distance to a target boxing bag), expert kickboxers (N = 21) would be more creative due to the functional characteristics of their actions in comparison to novices (N = 21). The results generally supported expectations, indicating that experts demonstrated a significantly greater number of functional action variants than novices. And, when functionality was not accounted for, both experts and novices were equally capable of developing unique actions. Interestingly, for both groups, the number of unique actions exhibited was strongly positively correlated with the tendency to distribute exploration of actions broadly across action variants. However, experts revealed a significantly reduced tendency to distributed exploration across action variants compared to novices which was likely due to the experts avoiding less functional actions at close and far distances to the target. Promoting creative action occurrence during practice is linked to exploration and functional movement variability which may be stimulated by learning environments and tasks that are scaled to individual constraints.