In recent models of decision-making, cognitive scientists have examined the relationship between option generation and successful performance. These models suggest that those who are successful at decision-making generate few courses of action and typically choose the first, often best, option. Scientists working in the area of expert performance, on the other hand, have demonstrated that the ability to generate and prioritize task-relevant options during situation assessment is associated with successful performance. In the current study, we measured law enforcement officers' performance and thinking in a simulated task environment to examine the option generation strategies used during decision-making in a complex domain. The number of options generated during assessment (i.e., making decisions about events in the environment) and intervention (i.e., making decisions about personal courses of action) phases of decision-making interact to produce a successful outcome. The data are explained with respect to the development of a situational representation and long-term working memory skills capable of supporting both option generation processes.

Please cite this article as: Belling, P.K., Suss, J., Ward, P., Advancing theory and application of cognitive research in sport: Using representative tasks to explain and predict skilled anticipation, decision-making, and option-generation behavior,

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Signal Detection Theory (SDT) has been applied to examine expertise-related differences in perceptual judgments of deceptive and non-deceptive movements in sport (e.g., handball, soccer). Deceptive actions in sport-related tasks (i.e., faking in rugby, fake passes in basketball) affects anticipation performance in both novice and expert athletes (i.e., more incorrect responses in deceptive actions compared to incorrect responses in non-deceptive actions); however, experts still outperform novices when facing deceptive actions in sport-related tasks (Güldenpenning, Kunde, & Weigelt, 2017). To date, this approach has not yet been applied to shoot/don’t shoot scenarios in law enforcement. To address this issue, we filmed actors pulling out either a weapon (i.e., gun) or a non-weapon (i.e., cell phone). We then edited the videos to create temporally-occluded stimuli. College students observed the videos and indicated whether the object was a weapon or a non-weapon. We conducted two experiments: across both we found that participants’ responses were more likely to be correct at later occlusion points, when the object was fully observable. We also found that when the object was fully observable, participants were more likely to identify the object as a gun rather than a cell phone. The results can inform the design of decision-making training for police.