Information-movement coupling as a hallmark of sport expertise.

Applied Cognitive Psychology

A prominent topic is whether visual or motor expertise makes greater contribution to expert visual anticipation in sport. This stems from psychological theories, such as common coding theory, which predicts perception and action can inform each other in a bidirectional manner. This paper reviews the literature that has investigated visual and motor expertise contributions to expert visual anticipation in sport. First, psychological theories are discussed that predict visual and motor contributions to perceptual-motor behaviour. Second, classifications of motor skills and studies are presented to evaluate the literature reviewed. Third, literature is reviewed with reference to performance, learning, and transfer of visual anticipation, which are all vital for successful sports performance. The review aims to stimulate thought about mechanisms underpinning visual and motor expertise relative to performance, learning, and transfer of anticipation skill, which can better guide the practitioner to improve skill.

2010

ABSTRACT Exquisite visually-guided movements underpin expertise in fast interceptive sports. The assumption that skilled performance relies on superior visual skills has been challenged by studies of sporting expertise which typically advocate vision to be a poor predictor of sporting success.

The use of a particular attentional paradigm, the paradigm of Sidedness has highlighted as professional volleyball players differ from nonplayers in the ability to encode specific spatial indexes. The presentation of images of hands of potential adversaries incorporates meanings related to sport that make volleyball athletes sensitive to directional spatial characteristics previously unobserved. What appears to be crucial in the generation of such effect is the ability to predict the direction of an action.

European Journal of Human Movement, 2015

The ecological approach that has come to be used in recent years to frame the learning and performance of sports skills, contrasts with the explanatory models of motor control that traditionally attach great importance to the mental representations of movement. In this sense, this work frames the ecological vision of cognition in sport in a comprehensive perspective, describing the athlete as a whole and not just what is happening inside his "head". We conclude that the emergent action in sports context results primarily from the interaction that the athlete establishes with the environment, therefore it is not necessary to use cognitive processes designed to succeed in the task. In this context, we propose to coaches that they should explore the functional aspects that underlie the manipulation of individual, environmental and task constraints, thus allowing their athletes to autonomously discover motor solutions and find relevant information-action couplings by themselves.

International Journal of Sport and …, 2004

Journal of Sports Sciences, 2014

Coordination of dynamic interceptive movements is predicated on cyclical relations between an individual's actions and information sources from the performance environment. To identify dynamic informational constraints, which are interwoven with individual and task constraints, coaches' experiential knowledge provides a complementary source to support empirical understanding of performance in sport. In this study, 15 expert coaches from 3 sports (track and field, gymnastics and cricket) participated in a semi-structured interview process to identify potential informational constraints which they perceived to regulate action during run-up performance. Expert coaches' experiential knowledge revealed multiple information sources which may constrain performance adaptations in such locomotor pointing tasks. In addition to the locomotor pointing target, coaches' knowledge highlighted two other key informational constraints: vertical reference points located near the locomotor pointing target and a check mark located prior to the locomotor pointing target. This study highlights opportunities for broadening the understanding of perception and action coupling processes, and the identified information sources warrant further empirical investigation as potential constraints on athletic performance. Integration of experiential knowledge of expert coaches with theoretically driven empirical knowledge represents a promising avenue to drive future applied science research and pedagogical practice.

2007

Research focusing on perceptual-cognitive skill in sport is abundant. However, the existing qualitative syntheses of this research lack the quantitative detail necessary to determine the magnitude of differences between groups of varying levels of skills, thereby limiting the theoretical and practical contribution of this body of literature. We present a meta-analytic review focusing on perceptual-cognitive skill in sport (N = 42 studies, 388 effect sizes) with the primary aim of quantifying expertise differences. Effects were calculated for a variety of dependent measures (i.e., response accuracy, response time, number of visual fixations, visual fixation duration, and quiet eye period) using point-biserial correlation. Results indicated that experts are better than nonexperts in picking up perceptual cues, as revealed by measures of response accuracy and response time. Systematic differences in visual search behaviors were also observed, with experts using fewer fixations of longer duration, including prolonged quiet eye periods, compared with nonexperts. Several factors (e.g., sport type, research paradigm employed, and stimulus presentation modality) significantly moderated the relationship between level of expertise and perceptual-cognitive skill. Practical and theoretical implications are presented and suggestions for empirical work are provided.

Skill practitioners such as coaches, judges, and rehabilitation specialists rely heavily on the visual observation of movement to analyse performance, concomitantly performers of movement rely heavily on kinaesthetic sensitivity to produce movements of desired precision. The observation of movement errors (by coaches or therapists) and the correction of movement errors (by performers or patients) depend on fundamentally different perceptual systems that may differ in their sensitivity, units of control and trainability. This paper first examines the skill of perceiving fundamental movement characteristics and patterns (i.e., movement kinematics) by reviewing sport expertise literature that has investigated the capabilities of both expert performers and expert observers. Important expertise related differences in visual perceptual skill are discussed with a focus on perceptual and motor contributions to perceptual skill. Theories related to the perception of others movement patterns ...

Attention, perception & psychophysics, 2014

Sports involving fast visual perception require players to compensate for delays in neural processing of visual information. Memory for the final position of a moving object is distorted forward along its path of motion (i.e., "representational momentum," RM). This cognitive extrapolation of visual perception might compensate for the neural delay in interacting appropriately with a moving object. The present study examined whether experienced batters cognitively extrapolate the location of a fast-moving object and whether this extrapolation is associated with coincident timing control. Nine expert and nine novice baseball players performed a prediction motion task in which a target moved from one end of a straight 400-cm track at a constant velocity. In half of the trials, vision was suddenly occluded when the target reached the 200-cm point (occlusion condition). Participants had to press a button concurrently with the target arrival at the end of the track and verbally report their subjective assessment of the first target-occluded position. Experts showed larger RM magnitude (cognitive extrapolation) than did novices in the occlusion condition. RM magnitude and timing errors were strongly correlated in the fast velocity condition in both experts and novices, whereas in the slow velocity condition, a significant correlation appeared only in experts. This suggests that experts can cognitively extrapolate the location of a moving object according to their anticipation and, as a result, potentially circumvent neural processing delays. This process might be used to control response timing when interacting with moving objects.

Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 2006

Objective: Athletes in various game sports and combat sports execute motor reactions under time pressure to perceived movement sequences of opponents or team members without awareness of any particular trigger stimuli. In the past, this special form of decision making in sports has been primarily examined in studies on perceptual skills and, although less frequently, in studies on intuitive decision-making in sports. Although both lines of research have contributed essential knowledge to an understanding of this stimulusreaction behavior under time pressure, a theoretical framework to comprehensively address the underlying cognitive processes as well as the acquisition and the execution of these motor responses is still in demand. Conclusion: In this position paper we assume that rapid motor reactions are primed by the perception of non-consciously represented movement features embedded in the movement sequences of sports partners. This particular form of perceptual identification of visual movement stimuli through fast motor reactions is argued to be based on a common coding of perceptual and action processes. Primed motor reactions rely on an earlier learning process in which the perception of non-consciously represented movement features is coupled with motor processes executing a fast motor response. A two-stage process is suggested to describe the acquisition and the execution of the reported motor reaction behavior. An extension of existing theories