Decision Making Skill and Complex Problem Solving in Team Sports

This thesis aimed to enhance understanding of the nature of knowledge bases possessed by elite sports performers which underpin perceptual-cognitive and decision making skills. Two main theories were considered; Active Control of Thought (ACT*) and Representational Redescription (RR). The purpose of Study 1 was to examine the anticipatory ability of elite and non-elite players in football and hockey. The results indicated that elite players in both sports were quicker and more accurate in their expectation of pass destination. Study 2 aimed to understand the extent to which knowledge is transferable. The results indicated that elite players’ knowledge is relatively domain specific although some elements of underlying task strategy may transfer. The objective of Study 3 was to explore the means by which elite and non-elite players in football and hockey identify and differentiate between possible decisions. Results showed elite players’ rationale was based on deeper theoretical principles whilst non-experts utilised relatively superficial information and naïve theories. Study 4 focussed on problem representations of elite and non-elite football players. Results revealed elite players’ representations were more pertinent, connected and articulated in a more effective manner. Overall, the findings from the current thesis provide advanced understanding of the knowledge bases responsible for perceptual-cognitive and decision making skill, and such understanding may assist attempts to enhance athletes’ performance and support future research

Does decision making transfer across similar and dissimilar sports?

Objectives: The ability to make decisions under time pressure is crucial to performance in sport. However, there remains a paucity of research that examines whether the skills underpinning decision-making transfer across similar or dissimilar sports. We examine whether decision making transfers from soccer to other sports that may be deemed to be either similar (basketball) or dissimilar (tennis) based on sports taxonomy. Methods: Skilled soccer players (N = 20) completed a video-based temporal occlusion test designed to measure decision-making involving offensive sequences of play from soccer, basketball, and tennis. Participants were required to decide on an appropriate action to execute for each situation presented. Results: Response accuracy was higher in the soccer decision-making task compared to the basketball and tennis tasks. Furthermore, accuracy scores were higher on the basketball compared to the tennis task. Conclusions: There appears to be some positive transfer of decision-making between sports that share similar elements, supporting the importance both of specificity and generality in expert performance

ADOPTING GAME SENSE APPROACH TO TEACHING AND COACHING OF SPORTS IN ZIMBABWE

Teaching games has always required a holistic approach that focuses on the physical, social and intellectual domains of the individual participant. In this regard, Game Sense Approach can be seen as an approach that allows students to be free to play games while learning, creating a sense of having fun during learning. This leads to a healthy, active and fulfilling life of the learner. This paper looks at the game sense approach in physical education, with a view of recommending its adoption to sports coaching and teaching in Zimbabwe, resulting in promoting changes in the culture of sports engagement. This will eventually develop a mindset shift to game-centred sports coaching in Zimbabwe. The study uses literature search to put its case forward. It recommends that Zimbabwe can successfully embark on coaching development programmes that adopt the game sense approach to sport teaching and coaching. Game Sense Approach empowers teachers and coaches with greater tactical understanding of games, making it much easier for them to effectively teach and coach sport in Zimbabwe. The study, therefore, recommends that Game Sense be introduced in Zimbabwe to allow for those who are involved in sports to have a sound understanding of match conditions and be able to transfer learning from practice to actual game situations. Game Sense can be seen as exposing players to inquiry-based learning which allows players to explore enjoy themselves under natural and authentic learning environments.  Article visualizations

Sport specialization in youth: A literature review

Objective: Youth participation in sport is reviewed to include its history, current growth patterns, reasons behind sport specialization, and the implications of sport specialization. The effects of early skill acquisition, and the sociological, psychological, and physical/physiological aspects to help develop safeguards to meet the needs of young athletes are discussed. Study Design and Selection: A review of the research and scholarly literature related to the youth population in the United States was performed. This included accessing the Mayo Clinic Library database, MANTIS, and Index Medicus. Results and Discussion: Specialization in a single sport, although not new to society, has become increasingly popular. Sport specialization training can begin as early as at the age of 5 or 6. The training is throughout the year and may take up to four hours every day. Some in the sports community find sport specialization to be a reflection of a highly developed society and see the skill acquisition and enhancement as beneficial to success in a given sport; the potential for a collegiate athletic scholarship or making a varsity, elite, or even professional level team. Regular physical activity and sport, together with a balanced diet, are essential to promote optimal growth and maturation, sufficient physical fitness and mental vigor, as well as psychological and social benefits that help in coping with stress and anxiety. However, too much or too specific involvement with a sport or activity can be potentially dangerous, involving physiological/physical, psychological, and sociological risks to youth. Despite the importance of this topic, there is a lack of a substantial reference base pertaining specifically to sport specialization. The results were often limited to a non-specific age range within the youth population and primarily of United States youth as opposed to a worldwide population. Also, a majority of the references contained more physiological results as opposed to psychological and sociological findings. The results and conclusions drawn from this sampling cannot be generalized to all sports or athletes as a whole. Conclusion: Sport specialization by youth is a contentious issue that needs to be fully understood by all involved in sport. The potential health, psychological, and sociological risks must be weighed against the benefits of obtaining sharper skills, which may enhance playing time, possibly bringing scholarship opportunities, or reaching to an elite level of play

Perceptual-Cognitive Assessments in Football

Introduction: Assessments with varying levels of perceptual information or action fidelity are commonly used in the detection and identification of talent in football. Common performance assessments can range from either highly sport-specific environments with players being immersed in a realistic environment and interacting with a football (i.e. domain-specific, high ecological validity), to players sitting in front of a computer responding to various shapes and colours with no sport-specific information presented (i.e. domain-generic, low ecological validity). Many testing batteries measure athletes with a multitude of different tests that are placed along various points on ecological validity continuum. However, very few of these assessments are sufficiently validated. For the assessments that attempt to closely replicate the perception-action coupling demands experienced in football game play, there are many conditions that must be met before it can be used in future research and practice. On the other side of the spectrum, it remains contentious whether using assessments that intentionally remove ecological validity from their environments has merit. These non-sport specific assessments attempt to measure the general cognitive abilities of athletes, and many researchers have advocated their usefulness in talent identification programs. Therefore, the collection of aims within this dissertation was three-fold: i) to investigate both the domain-generic and domain-specific perceptual-cognitive abilities of all athletes (i.e. academy to senior players) in order to understand what perceptual-cognitive abilities athletes exhibit, and what factors (i.e. environment and heritable) contributed towards their cognitive profile, ii) to track both domain-specific and domain-generic abilities longitudinally in order to understand their relationships with increased exposure to football training, and iii) to learn from the limitations of the domain-specific skills assessment and incorporate new technologies in order to gain a further insight to investigate how emerging technologies could help to develop more representative assessments. Methods: To understand the between-group differences of domain-generic and domain-specific abilities across the youth developmental period of athletes, a variety of independent studies were undertaken. First, 343 male players (age: 10.34 – 34.72 years; playing experience: 5 – 22 years) from the U12-Senior age groups of a professional German football club were recruited. Age, experience and playing position were recorded to examine which factors contributed more to the development of domain-generic abilities (Chapter 3). Players participated in four generic cognitive tasks aimed at measuring higher-level cognitive functioning: a precued choice response-time task, a stop-signal reaction-time task, a sustained attention task, and a multiple-object tracking task. Second, a new football-specific skills test was used to measure the domain-specific abilities of the athletes throughout adolescence, and the reliability and age-discriminant validity of this new domain-specific skills test was investigated (Chapter 4). Third, 304 players from the same cohort as Chapter 3 had their data analysed longitudinally to track the longitudinal development of both domain-generic (assessments from Chapter 3) and domain-specific (assessment from Chapter 4) abilities across three seasons (Chapter 5). Lastly, the final investigation of the dissertation was divided in two parts to explore how to develop more representative task designs within the football specific skills assessment used in the previous chapters. Accordingly, Chapter 6a) 85 amateur male participants (19.5 ± 5.4 years old; 13.1 ± 6.0 years playing football) completed two sessions in the skills assessment task under two different visual conditions: stroboscopic and full vision Participants were subdivided into skilled (S: top 50%) and less-skilled (LS: bottom 50%) groups using their point score from the full vision condition. Chapter 6b) Exploratory head movements of fourteen U13 and thirteen U23 high-level football players were recorded with a head worn inertial sensor in the skills assessment task, from which the count, frequency and excursion of head movements were extracted before and during ball possession investigate whether visual exploratory action is associated with passing performance. Results: Chapter 3 first demonstrated that a negatively accelerated curve generally best described the relationship between age, experience and domain-generic abilities. Age and experience only explained a very low to moderate proportion of the variance in EFs (marginal explained variance ranged between 2 and 57%). Furthermore, although Chapter 4 revealed that the new domain-specific skills test yielded acceptable test-retest reliability for the correct number of passes to a target (CV = 7.5-11.1; r = 0.48; p<0.001) and the speed at which they completed each trial (CV = 2.6-5.1; r = 0.70; p<0.001), the assessment was not able to differentiate between athletes over the age of 15. This plateau in both the developmental trajectories of domain-generic (Chapter 3) and domain-specific (Chapter 4) abilities was confirmed in the longitudinal study (Chapter 5), revealing that a performance plateau was apparent for domain-specific abilities during adolescence (i.e. 15 years old), whereas domain-generic abilities improved into young adulthood (i.e. 21 years old). Consequently, a further investigation into more representative task design had merit, where Chapter 6a) reported that restricting athletes’ visual feedback in the football skills assessment impacted time of completion per trial to in both S and LS groups equally (S: 0.21s; LS: 0.18s; p=0.543), but S athletes’ accuracy (S: 11.7%; LS: 0.4%; p<0.001) were significantly more affected compared to full vision conditions. Lastly, Chapter 6b) reported that the variables that best explained faster performance were a higher number of head turns before receiving the ball, and a lower number of head turns when in possession of the ball, which older athletes perform better than younger athletes. Discussion/conclusion: Overall, the investigation into domain-generic assessments across Chapter 3 and 5 found that athletes improve their performance during late childhood until reaching adolescent (i.e. average age of 15 years old) and was independent of how many years of experience playing football or which position they played on the field. As the developmental trajectories of high-level football players’ domain-generic abilities reflected those observed in general populations’ despite long-term exposure to football-specific training and gameplay, this questions the relationship between high-level experience’s capacity to improve domain-generic abilities and challenges the validity of including non-sport specific assessments as a measure of football performance potential in high performing athletes. Lastly, despite the best efforts to use highly technical assessments to measure football skills in Chapter 4 and 5, the assessments may have under-represented the perceptual or action components necessary to allow athletes to demonstrate their expertise. Thus, more studies that aim to improve on the task designs of assessment tools has merit, and future studies could build off the foundations from the studies within Chapter 6 [i.e. stroboscopic glasses (6a) and head movement sensors (6b)] as methods to expand on the representativeness of assessment tasks

Implementing game sense coaching approach in Australian football through action-research

This paper introduces the methods, selected findings and discussion of an action research investigating a coach and player experience of Game Sense coaching as a new approach to coaching an Australian football team. The study was conducted over five months, which covered the in-season training segment of the coach’s training plan. The study involved the coach systematically reflecting on the experience of coaching and regular conversations with the sport pedagogue through coach use of a reflective journal. During the final week of training players were invited to complete a coaching efficacy survey to elicit qualitative data in an attempt to gain insights into their experience of the coaching. At the conclusion of the season the coach participated in a semi-structured interview with the sport pedagogue. The research adds further evidence that game-centred coaching approaches like the Game Sense approach take time to learn, require greater instructional knowledge and game understanding by the coach, and may be misinterpreted as small sided games.Este artículo presenta los métodos, algunos resultados y la discusión de un estudio de investigación-acción centrado en la experiencia del entrenador y de algunos jugadores de fútbol australiano que siguieron un plan de entrenamiento basado en el enfoque comprensivo del sentido de juego (“game sense coaching”). El estudio se desarrolló durante cinco meses, incluyendo los entrenamientos durante la temporada planificados por el entrenador. El estudio implicó la reflexión sistemática, mediante un diario, del entrenador sobre su experiencia, así como conversaciones regulares con el pedagogo deportivo (el investigador colaborador). Durante la última semana de entrenamiento, se invitó a los jugadores a realizar un cuestionario diseñado para obtener datos cualitativos sobre la efectividad del entrenamiento y sobre su propia experiencia. Al concluir la temporada, el entrenador participó en una entrevista semiestructurada con el pedagogo deportivo. El estudio viene a concluir que los enfoques de entrenamiento centrados en la comprensión del juego, como el “Game-Sense”, requieren más tiempo para ser dominados por parte de los entrenadores, un mayor conocimiento para su aplicación, desarrollo y comprensión del juego; y que puedes ser erróneamente interpretados como “partidillos”

Ecological cognition : expert decision-making behaviour in sport

Expert decision-making can be directly assessed, if sport action is understood as an expression of embedded and embodied cognition. Here, we discuss evidence for this claim, starting with a critical review of research literature on the perceptual-cognitive basis for expertise. In reviewing how performance and underlying processes are conceived and captured in extant sport psychology, we evaluate arguments in favour of a key role for actions in decision-making, situated in a performance environment. Key assumptions of an ecological dynamics perspective are also presented, highlighting how behaviours emerge from the continuous interactions in the performer-environment system. Perception is of affordances; and action, as an expression of cognition, is the realization of an affordance and emerges under constraints. We also discuss the role of knowledge and consciousness in decision-making behaviour. Finally, we elaborate on the specificities of investigating and understanding decision-making in sport from this perspective. Specifically, decision-making concerns the choice of action modes when perceiving an affordance during a course of action, as well as the selection of a particular affordance, amongst many that exist in a landscape in a sport performance environment. We conclude by pointing to some applications for the practice of sport psychology and coaching and identifying avenues for future research

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

Three perspectives have been taken to explain decision making within team sports (information processing, recognition primed decision making and ecological dynamics perspectives) resulting in conceptual tension and practical confusion. The aim of this paper was to interrogate empirical evidence to (1) understand the process of decision making within team sports and (2) capture the characteristics of decision making expertise in a team sport context. Nine electronic databases (SPORTdiscus, PsycINFO, PsycArticles, Psych-tests, PubMed, SAGE journals online, Web of knowledge, Academic search complete and Web of science) were searched until the final return in March 2021. Fifty-three articles satisfied the inclusion criteria, and were analysed thematically and synthesisd using a narrative approach. Findings indicate that the relative absence or presence of mental representation within the decision making process depends on factors including complexity, typicality, time available and contextual priors available in the game situation. We recommend that future research should integrate concepts and methodologies prevalent within each perspective to better understand decision making within team sports before providing implications for practitioners

Do You Transfer Your Skills? From Sports to Health Management in Cancer Patients

Skill transfer is a process where personal cognitive and behavioral abilities are applied to contexts that are different from the one in which they were originally learned. Literature demonstrates that skill transferability is possible: for example, people can apply skills learned in sports to other life-domains (such as school, work, or health management) with the aim to improve individual characteristics and reach personal goals. To do this, several factors, such as positive communication, adequate context, a person-centered perspective, and specific strategies, are necessary. On the basis of this, the aim of this contribution is explore the relationship between sports and health management skills to enhance the coach/athlete as well as the patient/physician relationships. Useful strategies for skill transfer from sports to cancer management are shown