The relative age effect among Malaysian university athletes: a cross-sectional survivorship analysis with exploratory AI-based movement screening.

In the context of deepening globalization and the pervasive embedding of digital media in everyday life, young people's multicultural experiences are increasingly exhibiting deterritorialized and fragmented features. The role of local culture in their identity construction faces new challenges (). Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH), as a form of “living cultural practice” (), serves as a crucial trajectory connecting individuals with cultural traditions by integrating embodied experiences (), affective memories (), and social interactions () within specific activities. ICH is not merely an issue of preservation; it fundamentally encompasses intergenerational transmission, cultural identity, and community practices (). Although ICH education has expanded within curriculum systems and practical pedagogy (), existing research predominantly focuses on its pedagogical effectiveness or cultural dissemination functions (). The psychological processes through which individuals gradually construct cultural identities via experience, emotion, and meaning-making in specific contexts remain largely understudied. A critical and as yet insufficiently explicated issue is the simultaneous generation of immediate affective responses () and emotional resonance () among students engaged in rich cultural experiences. But these emotions do not consistently translate into sustained cultural identities (), let alone develop into a sense of community with a consciousness of responsibility. The question of why the emotional connections fostered by university faculty and students in experiencing ICH do not naturally evolve into cultural identity (), and how individual-level identity can ascend to a collective “we” consciousness within educational settings, constitute core issues that ICH education practices urgently need to address. Existing research indicates that affective experiences may contribute to the formation of cultural identity (); however, the specific trajectories through which they operate within the context of cultural heritage education remain underspecified. Cultural identity is often treated as a singular experience variable (), neglecting its internal generative trajectories and developmental stages, and lacking a detailed, in-depth study of the “ICH Experience—Cultural Identity” transformation process. On the one hand, at the group level, individual cultural identification does not necessarily lead to the formation of community consciousness (). The transition from “I identify” to “we collectively identify” involves group interaction and the construction of a sense of responsibility through practical engagement, a process that remains systematically unarticulated in the current literature. On the other hand, ICH education is typically embedded within multiple contexts, including classroom instruction, extracurricular activities, field practices, and digital platforms (K. ). How different contextual structures influence identity construction, and how multiple stakeholders, such as university faculty, ICH inheritors, and students, collaborate to jointly transmit ICH culture and education, have also not been adequately explored.