ABSTRACT. The authors studied changes in performance and kinematics during the acquisition of a l-handed catch. Participants were 8 women who took an intensive 2-week training program during which they evolved from poor catchers to sub-expert catchers. An increased temporal consistency, shift in spatial location of ball-hand contact away from the body, and higher peak velocity of the transport of the hand toward the ball accompanied their improvement in catching performance. Moreover, novice catchers first adjusted spatial characteristics of the catch to the task constraints and fine-tuned temporal features only later during learning. A principal components analysis on a large ...
<.05 for separate variables) from the actual PCA. For all PCAs, we retrieved the KMO test and Bartlett's test of sphericity to check whether the PCA was an appropriate analysis for the used data set. We chose the number of components to extract on the basis of the Kaiser criterion (eigenvalue>