Using a situation awareness approach to determine decision-making behaviour in squash

Abstract

Situation awareness (SA) refers to the awareness of all relevant sources of information, an ability to synthesise this information using domain knowledge gained from past experiences and the ability to physically respond to a situation. Expert-novice differences have been widely reported in decision-making in complex situations although determining the small differences in expert behaviour are more elusive. This study considered how expert squash players use SA to decide on what shot to play. Matches at the 2010 (n = 14) and 2011 (n = 27) Rowe British Grand Prix were recorded and processed using Tracker software. Shot type, ball location, players' positions on court and movement parameters between the time an opponent played a shot prior to the player's shot to the time of the opponent's following shot were captured 25 times per second. Six SA clusters were named to relate to the outcome of a shot ranging from a defensive shot played under pressure to create time to an attempted winner played under no pressure with the opponent out of position. This new methodology found fine-grained SA differences in expert behaviour, even for the same shot type played from the same court area, beyond the usual expert-novice differences.

Using a Situation Awareness Approach to Identify Differences in the Performance Profiles of the World’s Top Two Squash Players and Their Opponents

“…Shot type, ball location, players’ positions on court and movement parameters between the time an opponent played a shot prior to the player’s shot to the time of the opponent’s following shot were captured 25 times per second. All shots (excluding serves and rally ending shots) produced five main SA clusters, similar to those presented by Murray et al (2018), except a greater proportion of shots were categorized in the greater pressure clusters and less in the lower pressure ones.…”

“…Therefore, this study aimed at presenting a more accurate picture of shot distributions in elite male squash players and also increasing the likelihood of finding between player differences in shot outcomes, since shots that achieved their objective impacted their opponents similarly. The present study had a further purpose to increase the ecological validity of a previous study (Murray et al, 2018), using all shots irrespective of their outcome.…”

“…Murray et al (2018) described shot selection in squash from a situation awareness (SA) perspective (Endsley, 1995). SA refers to the awareness of relevant sources of information, the synthesis of this information using domain knowledge gained from past experiences (Abernethy et al, 2001) and the ability to physically respond to the situation.…”

“…SA refers to the awareness of relevant sources of information, the synthesis of this information using domain knowledge gained from past experiences (Abernethy et al, 2001) and the ability to physically respond to the situation. Murray et al (2018) suggested the relevant sources of information were likely to be related to events previously encountered (historical and within the game being played), opponent movements (visual cues) and probabilistic information such as a heuristic “in this situation it is likely that…...” This perspective demonstrates the complexity in deciding which shot to play and raises the question as to what extent individual differences affect this decision-making process. Within this SA perspective the final task of actually playing the shot is important since an inaccurate shot would give the opponent a relatively easy shot under no time pressure and thus offset any advantage gained from having successfully accomplished the first two tasks, e.g., identified the opponent’s shot early and been able to volley the ball and hence reduce time.…”

“…Murray et al (2018) presented six shot type clusters, referred to as SA clusters, named to relate to the outcome of a shot ranging from a “defensive” shot played under pressure to create time to an “attempted winner” played under no pressure with the opponent out of position. The important point was these authors used the term SA to reflect the point that the clusters represented both the intention to play a specific shot, based on the situation the player was in, and the outcome of the shot in terms of the effect the shot had on the opponent’s movement.…”