Foveal and Peripheral Fields of Vision Influences Perceptual Skill in Anticipating Opponents’ Attacking Position in Volleyball

Abstract

The importance of perceptual-cognitive expertise in sport has been repeatedly demonstrated. In this study we examined the role of different sources of visual information (i.e., foveal versus peripheral) in anticipating volleyball attack positions. Expert (n = 11), advanced (n = 13) and novice (n = 16) players completed an anticipation task that involved predicting the location of volleyball attacks. Video clips of volleyball attacks (n = 72) were spatially and temporally occluded to provide varying amounts of information to the participant. In addition, participants viewed the attacks under three visual conditions: full vision, foveal vision only, and peripheral vision only. Analysis of variance revealed significant between group differences in prediction accuracy with higher skilled players performing better than lower skilled players. Additionally, we found significant differences between temporal and spatial occlusion conditions. Both of those factors interacted separately, but not combined with expertise. Importantly, for experts the sum of both fields of vision was superior to either source in isolation. Our results suggest different sources of visual information work collectively to facilitate expert anticipation in time-constrained sports and reinforce the complexity of expert perception.

Decision-making and dynamics of eye movements in volleyball experts

“…They had to evaluate the representativeness of the sequences on a Likert type scale ranging from 0 ( not representative ) to 7 ( perfectly representative ). The 10 sequences of each type (total of 50) with the highest average scores were kept for the experimentation (for a similar selection method, see 39 , 40 ). Before the experiment, sequences were randomized, but all participants viewed the sequences in the same order.…”

“…Fixations occurring outside the identified AOIs corresponded to “elsewhere”. A region was considered fixed if the angular velocity of the eyes relative to the stimuli was 30°/s or less for at least 100 ms 39 , 41 . Number of fixations, fixation time, AOI fixated and the moment of fixation of those AOIs were measured.…”

Ghost-in-the-Machine reveals human social signals for human–robot interaction

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Effects of Video-Based Visual Training on Decision-Making and Reactive Agility in Adolescent Football Players

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