Our understanding of how experts integrate prior situation-specific information (i.e., contextual priors) with emergent visual information when performing dynamic and temporally constrained tasks is limited. We use a soccer-based anticipation task to examine the ability of expert and novice players to integrate prior information about an opponent's action tendencies with unfolding environmental information such as opponent kinematics. We recorded gaze behaviours and ongoing expectations during task performance. Moreover, we assessed their final anticipatory judgements and perceived levels of cognitive effort invested. Explicit contextual priors biased the allocation of visual attention and shaped ongoing expectations in experts, but not in novices. When the final action was congruent with the most likely action given the opponent's action tendencies, the contextual priors enhanced the final judgements for both groups. For incongruent trials, the explicit priors had a negative impact on the final judgements of novices, but not experts. We interpret the data using a Bayesian framework to provide novel insights into how contextual priors and dynamic environmental information are combined when making decisions under time pressure. Moreover, we provide evidence that this integration is governed by the temporal relevance of the information at hand as well as the ability to infer this relevance.

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It is proposed that experts are able to integrate prior contextual knowledge with emergent visual information to make complex predictive judgments about the world around them, often under heightened levels of uncertainty and extreme time constraints. However, limited knowledge exists about the impact of anxiety on the use of such contextual priors when forming our decisions. We provide a novel insight into the combined impact of contextual priors and anxiety on anticipation in soccer. Altogether, 12 expert soccer players were required to predict the actions of an oncoming opponent while viewing life-sized video simulations of 2-versus-2 defensive scenarios. Performance effectiveness and processing efficiency were measured under four conditions: no contextual priors (CP) about the action tendencies of the opponent and low anxiety (LA); no CP and high anxiety (HA); CP and LA; CP and HA. The provision of contextual priors did not affect processing efficiency, but it improved performance effectiveness on congruent trials. Anxiety negatively affected processing efficiency, but this did not affect the use of contextual priors or influence performance effectiveness. It appears that anxiety and prior contextual information impact attentional resources independent of each other. Findings are discussed with reference to current models of anticipation and anxiety.

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There is limited knowledge about the impact of task load on experts’ integration of contextual priors and visual information during dynamic and rapidly evolving anticipation tasks. We examined how experts integrate contextual priors––specifically, prior information regarding an opponent's action tendencies––with visual information such as movement kinematics, during a soccer‐specific anticipation task. Furthermore, we combined psychophysiological measures and retrospective self‐reports to gain insight into the cognitive load associated with this integration. Players were required to predict the action of an oncoming opponent, with and without the explicit provision of contextual priors, under two different task loads. In addition to anticipation performance, we compared continuous electroencephalography (EEG) and self‐reports of cognitive load across conditions. Our data provide tentative evidence that increased task load may impair performance by disrupting the integration of contextual priors and visual information. EEG data suggest that cognitive load may increase when contextual priors are explicitly provided, whereas self‐report data suggested a decrease in cognitive load. The findings provide insight into the processing demands associated with integration of contextual priors and visual information during dynamic anticipation tasks, and have implications for the utility of priors under cognitively demanding conditions. Furthermore, our findings add to the existing literature, suggesting that continuous EEG may be a more valid measure than retrospective self‐reports for in‐task assessment of cognitive load.