Jim,One mainstream psychologist who has had an interest in sports imagery is Allan Paivio, now emeritus at University of Western Ontario. Below is one relevant link.Sport Imagery Questionnaire, with some results http://dlibrary.acu.edu.au/staffhome/stburke/su02p1.htm
Thanks for this. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to contain a reference to a well-controlled experiment showing that prior imagery actually makes athletes perform better ("well-controlled" meaning one that randomly assigned subjects to conditions, used control groups to rule out obvious alternative explanations for any effects found, etc.). For instance, I noticed that one of the articles cited (Abma, et al., 2002) concluded that "the results suggest that the high confident athletes used more imagery, but they did not have higher imagery skills than low confident athletes." Of course, this may mean only that high confidence brings with it a higher willingnes to engage in imagery (e.g., those with lower confidence may fear that they will perform poorly in their imaginary excursion), not that the imagery brought with it any increase in either confidence or performance.
There must be such a study out there. Probably lots of them, right? Otherwise there wouldn't be such a consensus that vizualization is such a good thing. Can anyone out there provide us with a references to the "classic" studies that brought about this consensus?
Thanks,
--
Christopher D. Green
Department of Psychology
York University
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
M3J 1P3
e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
phone: 416-736-5115 ext. 66164
fax: 416-736-5814
http://www.yorku.ca/christo/
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