January 01, 2020

The aim of this study is to highlight a first monitoring session of the effects produced by working with the juggleboard, created by Craig Quat, applied to the development of specific technical abilities of Juggling, transposed on general motor abilities in working with disabled people. The study itself has been carried out on subjects with mid-to-high motor abilities and medium intellectual disabilities. The work has been valued with motor test given at the beginning and at the end of each working session. The results of the study highlight that the activity of Juggling with the juggleboard helps developing specific technic abilities and improves motor sequencing abilities and responsiveness to oculo-manual input of the participants.

January 01, 2020

The physical activity as a mean of maintaining the capabilities of dexterity and coordination in advanced ederly is part of the quality of life model today. The objective od this research was to analyze the relationship between eye – hand coordination and psychomotor degree by implementing a program of adapted juggling games to ten ederly. To do this, we evaluated these variables using assessment tools before, during and after the intervention. The results indicated that juggling games are a useful and effective for improving psychomotor degree and eye – hand speed coordination in advanced ederly.

January 01, 2020

(Visual Abstract ) The physical activity as a mean of maintaining the capabilities of dexterity and coordination in advanced ederly is part of the quality of life model today. The objective od this research was to analyze the relationship between eye – hand coordination and psychomotor degree by implementing a program of adapted juggling games to ten ederly. To do this, we evaluated these variables using assessment tools before, during and after the intervention. The results indicated that juggling games are a useful and effective for improving psychomotor degree and eye – hand speed coordination in advanced ederly.

Jan Scholz, Miriam C Klein, Timothy E J Behrens & Heidi Johansen-Berg
Nature Neuroscience published online 11 October 2009; doi:10.1038/nn.2412

Recent behavioral neuroscience research revealed that elementary reactive behavior can be improved in the case of cross-modal sensory interactions thanks to underlying multisensory integration mechanisms. Can this benefit be generalized to an ongoing coordination of movements under severe physical constraints? We choose a juggling task to examine this question. A central issue well-known in juggling lies in establishing and maintaining a specific temporal coordination among balls, hands, eyes and posture. Here, we tested whether providing additional timing information about the balls and hands motions by using external sound and tactile periodic stimulations, the later presented at the wrists, improved the behavior of jugglers. One specific combination of auditory and tactile metronome led to a decrease of the spatiotemporal variability of the juggler's performance: a simple sound associated to left and right tactile cues presented antiphase to each other, which corresponded to the temporal pattern of hands movement in the juggling task. A contrario, no improvements were obtained in the case of other auditory and tactile combinations. We even found a degraded performance when tactile events were presented alone. The nervous system thus appears able to integrate in efficient way environmental information brought by different sensory modalities, but only if the information specified matches specific features of the coordination pattern. We discuss the possible implications of these results for the understanding of the neuronal integration process implied in audio-tactile interaction in the context of complex voluntary movement, and considering the well-known gating effect of movement on vibrotactile perception.
Behavioral Impact of Unisensory and Multisensory Audio-Tactile Events: Pros and Cons for Interlimb Coordination in Juggling (PDF Download Available). Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/221882811_Behavioral_Impact_of_Unisensory_and_Multisensory_Audio-Tactile_Events_Pros_and_Cons_for_Interlimb_Coordination_in_Juggling [accessed Jul 15, 2017].

​​Kali Barawi, National Center for Mental Health (2016)
http://ncmh.info/blog/2016/03/17/circque-du-cerveau/

Driemeyer J, Boyke J, Gaser C, Büchel C, May A.

Department of Systems Neuroscience, University of Hamburg (UKE), Hamburg, Germany.

BACKGROUND: Recently, activation-dependant structural brain plasticity in humans  has been demonstrated in adults after three months of training a visio-motor skill. Learning three-ball cascade juggling was associated with a transient and highly selective increase in brain gray matter in the occipito-temporal cortex comprising the motion sensitive area hMT/V5 bilaterally. However, the exact time-scale of usage-dependant structural changes occur is still unknown. A better understanding of the temporal parameters may help to elucidate to what extent this type of cortical plasticity contributes to fast adapting cortical processes  that may be relevant to learning. PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: Using a 3 Tesla scanner and monitoring whole brain structure we repeated and extended our original study in 20 healthy adult volunteers, focussing on the temporal aspects of the structural  changes and investigated whether these changes are performance or exercise dependant. The data confirmed our earlier observation using a mean effects analysis and in addition showed that learning to juggle can alter gray matter in  the occipito-temporal cortex as early as after 7 days of training. Neither performance nor exercise alone could explain these changes. CONCLUSION: We suggest that the qualitative change (i.e. learning of a new task) is more critical for the brain to change its structure than continued training of an already-learned task.

PMCID: PMC2447176 PMID: 18648501 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]

J Neurosci. 2008 Jul 9;28(28):7031-5.

Boyke J, Driemeyer J, Gaser C, Büchel C, May A.

Department of Systems Neuroscience, University of Hamburg, D-22046 Hamburg, Germany.

It has been suggested that learning is associated with a transient and highly selective increase in brain gray matter in healthy young volunteers. It is not clear whether and to what extent the aging brain is still able to exhibit such structural plasticity. We built on our original study, now focusing on healthy senior citizens. We observed that elderly persons were able to learn three-ball cascade juggling, but with less proficiency compared with 20-year-old adolescents. Similar to the young group, gray-matter changes in the older brain related to skill acquisition were observed in area hMT/V5 (middle temporal area of the visual cortex). In addition, elderly volunteers who learned to juggle showed transient increases in gray matter in the hippocampus on the left side and in the nucleus accumbens bilaterally.

Bebko JM, Demark JL, Im-Bolter N, MacKewn A.

Department of Psychology, York University, 4700 Keele Street, Toronto, Ontario M3J 1P3, Canada. jbebko@yorku.ca

The authors evaluated the hypothesis that controlled and automatic processes are  opposite ends of a continuum of learning (e.g., R. M. Shiffrin & W. Schneider, 1977) vs. an alternative, concurrent emergence hypothesis (e.g., J. M. Bebko et al., 2003; G. Logan, 1989). The authors also measured potential positive transfer effects of learning from one motor task to another. Four experienced cascade jugglers and 5 novices learned to bounce juggle, practicing regularly for 5 weeks. The experienced jugglers showed positive transfer of learning, maintaining a lead of approximately 6-10 days over the novices, even as both groups automatized the new skill. Measures of automatic and controlled processing were positively correlated, indicating that those processes emerge concurrently. The authors present a model in which controlled and automatic processes emerge orthogonally.

Hashizume K, Matsuo T.

School of Health and Sport Sciences, Osaka University, Machikaneyama, Toyonaka, 560-0043, Japan. hashizume@skill.hss.osaka-u.ac.jp

Beek and van Santvoord [Beek, P. J., & van Santvoord, A. A. M. (1992). Journal of Motor Behavior, 24, 85-94] proposed a three-stage model of learning to juggle based on group analyses of temporal measures. Here, we examined in detail how the temporal and spatial features of juggling evolved in eight individual participants progressing from the second to the third stage of learning. During the second stage, the dwell ratio, defined as the ratio of the time that the juggler holds a ball between catch and toss and the hand cycle time (HCT), was stable when it was about 0.83. The subjects with a dwell ratio near this value and controlled throws exhibited stable juggling, whereas the subjects with a dwell ratio of 0.80 or smaller exhibited unstable juggling. Compared to the former group, the latter group had a longer time from the throw of a ball to the  arrival at its zenith (TZ), and a shorter time between the arrival of an airborne ball at its zenith and the subsequent throw (IZR). The latter group also exhibited larger variability in the dwell ratio and IZR. With practice, the subjects appropriated, on average, the duration of TZ and IZR to the dwell ratio  and improved the ability to accurately throw balls by changing the motions of the limb segments involved. Although these changes helped to stabilize the performance during the second stage, the variability problem was not sufficiently resolved. Only two out of eight subjects passed on to the third stage by the last (10th) Session. They achieved small variability in IZR, dwell ratio, and flight paths of the ball while juggling with short HCTs and small dwell ratios. These results suggest that the reduction of variability in these variables was essential to pass on to the third stage.

Beek PJ, van Santvoord AA.

Department of Psychology, Faculty of Human Movement Sciences, Vrije Universiteit  of Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

How beginning jugglers discover the temporal constraints governing the juggling workspace while learning to juggle three balls in a cascade pattern was the subject of this investigation. On the basis of previous theoretical and experimental work on expert jugglers, we proposed a three-stage model of the learning process, for which objective evidence was sought. The first stage consists of learning to accommodate the real-time requirements of juggling, as expressed in Shannon's equation of juggling, which states that, averaged over time, the cycle time of the hands should be a fixed proportion of the cycle time  of the balls. The second stage of learning consists of discovering the primary frequency lock of.75 between the shorter term dynamical regime underlying the repetitive subtask of transporting a ball and the longer term dynamical regime underlying the total hand loop cycle. The third and last stage of learning consists of discovering the principles of frequency modulation from.75 to lower (averaged) values of the proportion of time that a hand carries a ball during the total hand cycle time. Twenty subjects were taught to juggle three balls in a cascade pattern. Ten subjects were trained with the aid of an instructor and a metronome, and 10 with the instructor only. The metronome proved to be of no particular additional help, but the timing results obtained were in agreement with the proposed three stages of learning. The picture that emerged from this study was that learning a new motor skill involves the discovery of invariance's  or fixed points in the perceptual-motor workspace associated with that skill, from which excursions can be made and the skill further refined. Because these fixed points afford stability of operation, discovering them logically and factually precedes the acquisition of the functional adaptability and flexibility of operation ("flair") inherent to frequency modulation.

Huys R, Daffertshofer A, Beek PJ.

Institute for Fundamental and Clinical Human Movement Sciences, Faculty of Human  Movement Sciences, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

To study the acquisition of perceptual-motor skills as an instance of dynamic pattern formation, we examined the evolution of postural sway and eye and head movements in relation to changes in performance, while 13 novices practiced 3-ball cascade juggling for 9 weeks. Ball trajectories, postural sway, and eye and head movements were recorded repeatedly. Performance improved exponentially,  both in terms of the number of consecutive throws and the degree of frequency and phase locking between the ball trajectories. These aspects of performance evolved at different time scales, indicating the presence of a temporal hierarchy in learning. Postural sway, and eye and head movements were often 3:2 and sometimes  3:1 frequency locked to the ball trajectories. As a rule, the amplitudes of these oscillatory processes decreased exponentially at rates similar to that of the increase in the degree of phase locking between the balls. In contrast, the coordination between these oscillatory processes evolved exponentially at different time scales, apart from some erratic evolutions. Collectively, these findings indicate that skill acquisition in the perceptual-motor domain involves  multiple time scales and multiform dynamics, both in terms of the development of  the goal behavior itself and the evolution of the processes subserving this goal  behavior.

Haibach PS, Daniels GL, Newell KM.

Department of Kinesiology, The Pennsylvania State University, 276 Recreation Building, University Park 16802, USA. pss121@psu.edu

The experiment was setup to examine the coordination changes in assembling the movement form of 3-ball cascade juggling. Eight adult participants learned to juggle over 4 weeks of practice. Juggling scores were recorded at each session and performance was videotaped at eight selected sessions for purposes of movement analysis. Once the basic spatial and temporal constraints on cascade juggling were satisfied, and the figure-8 juggling mode was established, temporal modulations of the relative motions of the hands were emphasized. All participants learned to juggle and the increase over practice in the number of consecutive balls caught was best fit with a power law. The non-proportional rate of performance increment was consistent with the qualitative changes in the form  of the hand and ball movement kinematics that occurred over practice.