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

Perceptual-Cognitive Assessments in Football

University of Technology Sydney. Faculty of Health.Common performance assessments in sport can range from either highly realistic environments (i.e. domain-specific, high ecological validity), to players sitting in front of a computer responding to various non-sport-specific information presented (i.e. domain-generic, low ecological validity). However, very few of these assessments are sufficiently validated. Therefore, the collection of aims within this dissertation was three-fold: i) to assess all high-level athletes from the academy to senior professional teams players in order to understand what 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 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. 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

Match-related physical performance in professional soccer: Position or player specific?

The purpose of this study was to examine to what extent the physical match performance of professional soccer players is both position and player specific. First, official match data from the 2019/20 German Bundesliga season was used to search for players that met the inclusion criteria of playing a minimum of four entire matches in at least two different playing positions. Overall, 25 players met the criteria prior to the COVID-19 induced break, playing a minimum of eight matches. Second, the physical match performance of these players was analyzed separately for each position they played. The following four parameters were captured: total distance, high-intensity distance, sprinting distance, and accelerations. Third, the 25 players’ physical match performance data was then compared to normative data for each position they played to understand whether players adapted their physical performance (position dependent), or maintained their performance regardless of which position they were assigned to (position independent). When switching the position, the change in physical match performance of the respective players could be explained by 44–58% through the normative positional data. Moreover, there existed large individual differences in the way players adapted or maintained their performance when acting in different positions. Coaches and practitioners should be aware that some professional soccer players will likely incur differences in the composition of physical match performance when switching positions and therefore should pay special consideration for such differences in the training and recovery process of these players

The challenges and prospects of the intersection of humanities and data science: A white paper from The Alan Turing Institute

This paper was produced as part of the activities of the Humanities and Data Science Special Interest Group based at The Alan Turing Institute. The group has created the opportunity for fruitful conversations in this area and has brought together voices from a range of different disciplinary backgrounds. This document shows an example of how conversations of this type can benefit and advance computational methods and understandings in and between the humanities and data science, bringing together a diverse community. We believe the Turing can act as a nexus of discussion on humanities and data science research at the national (and international) level, in areas such as education strategy, research best practices, and funding policy, and can promote and encourage research activities in this interdisciplinary area

The association between visual exploration and passing performance in high-level U13 and U23 football players

Purpose: The visual exploratory actions (i.e., scanning head movements) used by football players to perceive their surrounding environment have recently gained interest. While this has resulted in important findings relating to visual exploration during natural match-play, often the study designs lacked the experimental control of laboratory-based experimental settings. We aimed to investigate whether visual exploratory action is associated with passing performance for high-level U13 and U23 players in a controlled skill assessment setting. Methods: Fourteen U13 and 13 U23 football players from a Bundesliga club completed a standardised 32-trial sequence in the Footbonaut. Exploratory head movements were recorded with a head-worn inertial sensor, from which the count, frequency and excursion of head movements were extracted before and during ball possession. Ball reception and disposal were coded for each trial, and performance was operationalised as the time taken to complete each trial. Results: Across all players, visual exploratory action was associated with passing performance. The variables that best explained faster performance were 1) a higher number of head turns before receiving the ball, 2) a lower number of head turns when in possession of the ball, and 3) being an U23 player. However, different combinations of variables explained performance for U13 and U23 players. Conclusion: The findings demonstrate the value of scanning before receiving the ball to prospectively control passing actions in the Footbonaut. Future research should investigate the shared and contrasting characteristics of scanning actions, as they are observed by players in skill assessment tasks such as the Footbonaut, during training and during match-play