Anticipation and Situation-Assessment Skills in Soccer Under Varying Degrees of Informational Constraint

Abstract

The authors tested the notion that expertise effects would be more noticeable when access to situational information was reduced by occluding (i.e., noncued) or freezing (i.e., cued) the environment under temporal constraints. Using an adaptation of tasks developed by Ward, Ericsson, and Williams, the participants viewed video clips of attacking soccer plays frozen or occluded at 3 temporal points and then generated and prioritized situational options and anticipated the outcome. The high-skill players anticipated the outcomes more accurately, generated fewer task-irrelevant options, and were better at prioritizing task-relevant options than their low-skill counterparts. The anticipation scores were significantly and positively correlated with the option prioritization and task-relevant options generated but not with the total options generated. Counter to the authors’ prediction, larger skill-based option-prioritization differences were observed when the play was frozen than when it was occluded. These results indicate that processing environmental information depends on temporal and contextual conditions.

Understanding a Player’s Decision-Making Process in Team Sports: A Systematic Review of Empirical Evidence

“…Sixteen studies presented the decision-making process as one encompassed by a player’s possession of specific key perceptual–cognitive skills [ 40 , 41 , 43 , 44 , 53 , 55 , 56 , 64 , 66 , 69 , 70 , 71 , 73 , 82 , 83 , 84 ] namely; the utilisation of domain knowledge in perceiving informational cues [ 44 , 55 , 66 ], the identification of global, salient and predictive cues [ 40 , 41 , 64 , 69 , 73 , 84 ], rapid retrieval of knowledge from memory representations [ 40 , 43 , 44 , 56 , 69 ], option generation [ 40 , 64 , 66 , 69 , 73 ], and the role of intuition in the form of the take the first heuristic [ 40 , 59 , 64 , 73 , 80 ]. A concurrent theme is the prevalence of representation as a connecting mechanism between what players see and how they act.…”

“…McPherson and Vickers [ 70 ] found that elite volleyball players update memory representations with knowledge of current event profiles (kinematic patterns, strengths, weaknesses, previous patterns of play) to inform future performance known as action-plan profiles. The sixteen studies on perceptual–cognitive expertise appear to agree that expert decision makers possess a larger ‘database’ of task specific information [ 40 , 43 , 44 , 56 , 69 ]. This ‘database’ of information is described as a catalyst for the retrieval of task specific mental representations that can be grown and refined to facilitate each stage of a perception-cognition-action process [ 40 , 71 ].…”

“…Four of these studies investigated expert team sport players decision-making, in the form of the intuitive take the first heuristic or option generation processes [ 40 , 64 , 73 , 80 ]. Klatt et al [ 64 ] compared the decision-making accuracy of elite Brazilian and German senior academy football players through a video decision-making task.…”

“…Intuition was measured by assessing the accuracy of participants’ first options, whilst creativity was measured in the number of appropriate options participants were able to generate. Basevitch et al [ 40 ]; high skill vs. low skill and Musculus [ 73 ]; expert vs. near expert also employed video based decision-making tasks that assessed participants decision-making process in line with the “less is more” take-the first heuristic or “more-is-more” option generation processes whilst manipulating time available to make a decision. Participant responses in all three studies were valued against an expert coaching panel who indicated a rank of which options were best in each trial.…”

What Cognitive Mechanism, When, Where, and Why? Exploring the Decision Making of University and Professional Rugby Union Players During Competitive Matches

“…Time available seemed to coincide with their decision making process. These findings from Raab (2003) and Basevitch et al (2019) offer an implication that the application of decision making processes at an individual level may depend on the demands of different game moments (Araújo and Bourbousson, 2016). Raab (2003) suggested that investigation into implicit or explicit cognitive processes within team sports must consider the role of the environment where one must question whether a cognitive mechanism, whether absent, good or bad, rational or irrational, may be best understood relative to its contextual surroundings (Raab, 2003).…”