The integration of explicit contextual priors and visual information during action anticipation in soccer

Abstract

The overarching aim of this thesis was to gain further insights into expert athletes’ integration of explicit contextual priors and visual information during action anticipation. In order to achieve this, four experimental studies were conducted, in which soccer players had to predict the forthcoming actions of oncoming opponents, both with and without explicit priors pertaining to their action tendencies. The first study examined skill-level differences with regard to the impact of explicit contextual priors on task performance and the processing strategies employed. Experts integrated explicit contextual priors to inform their acquisition of visual information more effectively than novices, which resulted in superior task performance. The second study explored the extent to which the comparative reliability of explicit contextual priors and visual information affected experts’ anticipatory judgements. The impact of priors decreased as their reliability decreased relative to the opponent’s kinematics, and vice versa. The third study investigated the impact of explicit contextual priors on experts’ cognitive load and the extent to which their performance was modulated by task load. Online psychophysiological measures, but not retrospective self-reports, revealed that explicit contextual priors evoked increases in cognitive load. Furthermore, increased task load seemed to disrupt the integration of priors and visual information, which negatively affected anticipation performance. The fourth study examined the impact of judgement utility on experts’ anticipatory judgements and their integration of contextual priors with visual information. Judgement utility supressed the players’ reliance upon contextual priors and pertinent visual information and biased their judgement toward the option of comparatively higher utility. These findings have implications for the development of an overarching theoretical framework of action anticipation in sport, they provide valuable applied insight with regard to the usefulness of explicit contextual priors in performance settings, and highlight important methodological issues concerning the assessment of athletes’ information acquisition and integration processes during action anticipation tasks.