“I Spy with My Little Eye!”: Breadth of Attention, Inattentional Blindness, and Tactical Decision Making in Team Sports

Abstract

Failures of awareness are common when attention is otherwise engaged. Such failures are prevalent in attention-demanding team sports, but surprisingly no studies have explored the inattentional blindness paradigm in complex sport game-related situations. The purpose of this paper is to explore the link between breadth of attention, inattentional blindness, and tactical decision-making in team ball sports. A series of studies revealed that inattentional blindness exists in the area of team ball sports (Experiment 1). More tactical instructions can lead to a narrower breadth of attention, which increases inattentional blindness, whereas fewer tactical instructions widen the breadth of attention in the area of team ball sports (Experiment 2). Further meaningful exogenous stimuli reduce inattentional blindness (Experiment 3). The results of all experiments are discussed in connection with consciousness and attention theories as well as creativity and training in team sports.

The dark side of visual awareness in sport: Inattentional blindness in a real-world basketball task

“…Although the finding that IB occurs among experienced athletes is interesting, comparing the present results with the results found by Memmert and Furley (2007) raises problems, given the changes made in the basketball IB task. For this reason, we incorporated an expert and a novice group into Experiment 2, in order to investigate whether IB would occur less among experts in a task related directly to their domain of expertise.…”

“…For these reasons, we hypothesized that, in a similar realworld IB task, IB would occur to a lesser degree among adults than was evident for the adolescent participants in Memmert and Furley (2007). This issue was addressed in Experiment 1.…”

“…Interestingly, Memmert and Furley (2007) found preliminary evidence that IB exists among adolescents in team ball sports by using a laboratory handball-specific tactical-decision-making task in which participants were instructed to focus their attention on their direct opponent. In their study, participants viewed videos in a dual-task situation.…”

“…Thus, it is important to understand more about the cost of such inattention in the field of sports. Memmert and Furley (2007) illustrated neatly that instructions intended to facilitate perception can, in fact, be detrimental for the decision-making process by reducing the attentional flexibility of adolescent athletes. Flexibility of attention is usually defined as the ability to quickly disengage, move, and engage attention on various locations in space (Tenenbaum & Bar-Eli, 1995).…”

“…According to this, one might argue that, since the test material utilized by Memmert and Furley (2007) was designed for adolescents (simple game situation, in which the last frame was visible for 3 sec), it did not demand enough attentional resources from adults, since Williams and Ford noted that increased experience of game situations leads to perceptual-cognitive adaptations in team ball players. These perceptual-cognitive advantages in team ball sports are most likely due to the following: pattern recognition (Tenenbaum, Levy-Kolker, Sade, Liebermann, & Lidor, 1996;Williams, Hodges, North, & Barton, 2006), which is the ability to detect meaningful patterns of play early in their development; superior visual search behaviors, such as fixation duration, number of fixations, and the proportion of time spent fixating specific areas of the display (for a review, see Vaeyens, Lenoir, Williams, information should actually get processed preferentially.…”