Finding appropriate and original solutions: An investigation into personal and situational factors that influence motor problem solving and creativity.

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The capacity to adaptively solve motor problems is a defining characteristic of motor skill and learning. Nevertheless, this has been an understudied area of research in movement sciences as well as being largely ignored for talent identification and development in sport and physical education programs. Concurrently, there is also an urgent need in cognitive sciences to examine the appropriateness of models of problem solving and creativity in task domains other than cognition.The research proposed aims to advance both the fields of motor skill and creativity research by adopting the dual pathway to problem solving and creativity model, a contemporary theory of creativity in cognition, in the motor domain. Specifically, we use validated motor creativity tests i) to investigate whether motor problem solving and creativity are mediated by the two separate pathways of flexibility and persistence, ii) to assess whether individual differences in motor problem solving and creativity reflect differential influences of breadth of attention and working memory to the flexibility and persistence pathways, iii) to investigate if a relationship exists between cognitive and motor problem solving and creativity and how this develops with age, and iv) to examine to what degree motor learning promotes problem solving and creativity in particular as a function of the degree of practice variability and the degree to which motor learning proceeds through the accrual of declarative knowledge.