Baseworks director of research Asia (Ksenia) Shcherbakova will present a poster at the 2026 Annual Conference of the Canadian Society for Psychomotor Learning and Sport Psychology (SCAPPS) in Ottawa, October 1 to 3, 2026. The poster is titled “Perceptual Skills in Movement Education: Discrimination as a Prerequisite for Appraisal and Behavioural Change.” Baseworks founder Patrick Oancia will attend alongside her.
SCAPPS is the Canadian society for research in motor learning, motor control, and sport and exercise psychology. Its annual conference brings together researchers, graduate students, and practitioners from kinesiology and psychology departments across the country. The 2026 meeting is hosted by the University of Ottawa. Keynote speakers are Paul Cisek (Université de Montréal) for motor learning and control, Mark Beauchamp (University of British Columbia) for sport and exercise psychology, and Tricia McGuire-Adams (University of Toronto) for the applied keynote.
What the presentation is about
Movement instruction depends on the learner being able to feel what the instruction refers to. When a teacher says “bring the arms to shoulder height,” the learner needs to be able to sense whether they did. The presentation treats this sensing as a skill in its own right: one that varies widely from person to person, and one that develops with practice. In many movement classes, feedback comes from a mirror or from the teacher’s eye; the presentation is about the feedback a learner gets from their own body. The concept of perceptual skills exists in primary research, and the presentation brings it into movement education.
The Baseworks Method was refined over ten years with more than 10,000 learners, with one requirement guiding every change: an instruction had to produce the intended movement reliably across a diverse group of people. Asia’s research analyses what that refinement produced. It identifies three types of body awareness that learners draw on. Proprioceptive awareness is the ability to feel specific sensations from the muscles. Spatial awareness is the ability to hold and reproduce a body position without looking. Interoceptive awareness is the awareness of internal states such as breathing, effort, stress, and fatigue.
Bodily sensing has three layers: telling sensations apart, relating to them, and using them as information to adjust behavior. Many body awareness assessment tools focus on the second and third, taking the sensations themselves for granted, as if they were already there. Asia’s analysis of interviews with practitioners shows that when learners report gains in appraisal or self-regulation, they consistently also report gains in discrimination, sensing at a higher resolution. Questionnaire data shows that people differ widely in their capacity to discriminate among muscular sensations. Video data shows recurring difficulties in sensing positional information. Learners who developed the ability to differentiate between bodily sensations in the three domains described changes that reached beyond movement, into how they manage effort, stress, and habits in daily life.
For movement education, this means that teaching people to perceive is as much a part of the work as teaching them the movement. For research on motor behaviour, it offers a framework that can be tested: three perceptual skills, each with unique failure patterns and training approaches.
The presentation connects to the work of Paul Cisek, this year’s keynote speaker in motor learning and control, whose affordance competition hypothesis describes how the brain selects between the actions available to it. A way of teaching that begins with discrimination fits that picture: what a person can sense shapes which actions are open to them.
Poster session
The poster session time will be confirmed when SCAPPS publishes the conference program, expected at the end of September. The conference takes place at the Delta Hotels Ottawa City Centre, 101 Lyon Street North, Ottawa.
Previous presentations
SCAPPS 2026 is the fifth research conference appearance for Baseworks. Asia previously presented at Neuropsychology Day at the Montreal Neurological Institute in 2025 and 2026, at the International Conference on Neuroscience and Neurology (ICNN 2025) in Astana, Kazakhstan, and at the 8th Annual Body Representation Network (BRNet) Meeting in Padova, Italy, in June 2026.
