“In-Between” is the title of this conference. If I am right, it focuses on the role of the artist as a middle-man, or middle-woman, between art and learner. It focuses, maybe, on the way artists are capable to transfer knowledge, skills, attitudes, insights, emotions of an artistic nature. And it focuses, maybe, on the way experiences from the domain of the arts may be transferred through the mechanism inherent in the domain of education; two domains which sometimes seem to have a rather problematic relation because the arts are seen as a domain of beauty, of expressivity, of individuality, of freedom, of creativity, whereas education is seen as the domain of standardization, of group work, of compliance to rules, and of mastering the existing.
In this study, we examined the effects of a defender contesting jump shots on performance and gaze behaviors of basketball players taking jump shots. Thirteen skilled youth basketball players performed 48 shots from about 5 m from the basket; 24 uncontested and 24 contested. The participants wore mobile eye tracking glasses to measure their gaze behavior. As expected, an approaching defender trying to contest the shot led to significant changes in movement execution and gaze behavior including shorter shot execution time, longer jump time, longer ball flight time, later final fixation onset, and longer fixation on the defender. Overall, no effects were found for shooting accuracy. However, the effects on shot accuracy were not similar for all participants: six participants showed worse performance and six participants showed better performance in the contested compared to the uncontested condition. These changes in performance were accompanied by differences in gaze behavior. The participants with worse performance showed shorter absolute and relative final fixation duration and a tendency for an earlier final fixation offset in the contested condition compared to the uncontested condition, whereas gaze behavior of the participants with better performance for contested shots was relatively unaffected. The results confirm that a defender contesting the shot is a relevant constraint for basketball shooting suggesting that representative training designs should also include contested shots, and more generally other constraints that are representative of the actual performance setting such as time or mental pressure.
When defending against hostile enemies, individual group members can benefit from others staying in the group and fighting. However, individuals themselves may be better off by leaving the group and avoiding the personal risks associated with fighting. While fleeing is indeed commonly observed, when and why defenders fight or flee remains poorly understood and is addressed here with three incentivized and preregistered experiments (total n = 602). In stylized attacker-defender contest games in which defenders could stay and fight or leave, we show that the less costly leaving is, the more likely individuals are to abandon their group. In addition, more risk-averse individuals are more likely to leave. Conversely, individuals more likely stay and fight when they have pro-social preferences and when fellow group members cannot leave. However, those who stay not always contribute fully to group defense, to some degree free-riding on the efforts of other group members. Nonetheless, staying increased intergroup conflict and its associated costs.
