It is well reported that expert athletes have refined perceptual-cognitive skills and fixate on more informative areas during representative tasks. These perceptual-cognitive skills are also crucial to performance within the domain of sports officials. We examined the visual scan patterns of elite and sub-elite association football referees while assessing foul play situations. These foul play situations (open play and corner kick situations) were presented on a Tobii T120 Eye Tracking monitor. The elite referees made more accurate decisions and differences in their visual search behaviors were observed. For the open play situations, referees in the elite group spent significantly more time fixating the most informative area of the attacking player (contact zone) and less time fixating the body part that was not involved in the infringement (non-contact zone). Furthermore, the average total fixation time in the contact zone and non-contact zone tended to differ between the elite and sub-elite referees in corner kick situations. In conclusion, elite level referees have learned to discern relevant from less-relevant information in the same way as expert athletes. Findings have implications for the development of perceptual training programs for sport officials.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s41235-016-0013-8) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

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In association football, the difficulty in making offside decisions depends on both perceptual and cognitive processes. Therefore, the objectives of the present study were to enhance the decision-making skills of assistant referees by further developing their ability to (1) time slice the incoming information flow into series of isolated time frames during an ongoing offside situation and (2) use this information to mentally read off the spatial positions of the key-role players. Training (n = 10) and control groups (n = 10) were exposed to a pre- and post-test, consisting of an offside decision-making and frame recognition test. In the latter, assistant referees were asked to indicate which of five photos best represented the spatial position of the defender and attacker at the moment of the pass. Only the training group received 12 web-based offside training sessions. First, the training group improved in mentally freezing, holding and scanning the mental picture of the offside situation in short-term memory from pre- to post-test, as evidenced by an increased recognition accuracy. Second, the improvement in recognition accuracy resulted in enhanced performance on the offside decision-making task. The benefits of web-based training are highlighted.

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Slow-motion footage results in higher accuracy scores for complex technical decisions. These findings have implications for the use of slow-motion replays in the decision-making process of referees.

We examined whether the use of three-dimensional (3D) simulations in an off-field offside decision-making task is beneficial compared to the more widely available two-dimensional (2D) simulations. Thirty-three assistant referees, who were all involved in professional football, participated in the experiment. They assessed 40 offside situations in both 2D and 3D formats using a counterbalanced design. A distinction was made between offside situations near (i.e., 15 m) and far (i.e., 30 m) from the touchline. Subsequently, a frame recognition task was performed in which assistant referees were asked to indicate which of the five pictures represented the previous video scene. A higher response accuracy score was observed under 3D (80.0%) compared to 2D (75.0%) conditions, in particular for the situations near the touchline (3D: 81.8%; 2D: 72.7%). No differences were reported between 2D and 3D in the frame recognition task. Findings suggest that in highly dynamic and complex situations, the visual system can benefit from the availability of 3D information, especially for relatively fine, metric position judgements. In the memory task, in which a mental abstraction had to be made from a dynamic situation to a static snapshot, 3D stereo disparities do not add anything over and beyond 2D simulations. The specific task demands should be taken into account when considering the most appropriate format for testing and training.

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In recent years, several publications examined the underlying mechanisms that might have an impact on decision-making processes under time pressure. This study investigated how individual differences in attentional capability relate to decision making in complex dynamic offside events. A total of 24 professional football assistant referees (ARs) performed an offside decision-making task and an attention-demanding task. ARs with higher attentional capability along the horizontal meridian of their attentional focus made fewer mistakes when judging offside situations in football than ARs with lower capability. This implies that being able to rely on high-attentional capabilities in situations requiring conscious perception of multiple processes is likely to be beneficial for the ultimate decision-making performance.