Perceptual-Cognitive Skills in Sport Flashcards
Perceptual-Cognitive Skills in Sport
Expert athletes have superior abilities:
- Biomechanical
- Physiological
- Perceptual
- Cognitive
- Psychological
- Ericsson (2003): ‘researchers, practitioners and athletes can contribute and benefit from a deeper understanding of the mechanisms that mediate expert performance and how performance can be best and most effectively improved
What are Perceptual-Cognitive Skills?
- Perception and action are mutually interdependent, cyclical processes that directly constrain and influence one another (Williams et al., 1999)
- “the ability to identify and acquire environmental information for integration with existing knowledge such that appropriate responses can be selected and executed” (Marteniuk, 1976)
What are Perceptual-Cognitive Skills?
Perception -> Action
What is meant by the term Cognition?
- “Cognition” (from “cognoscere” - to know) refers to the activity or process of knowing or seeking knowledge
- The term cognition broadly captures a variety of mental processes such as imagery, perception, memory, language
What is Cognitive Psychology?
- Cognitive psychology - the scientific study of how the human mind works in seeking, storing and using knowledge
- This is focused on mental processes, putting them at the centre of how we act based on prior knowledge
What is Memory?
Endel Tulving (1985):
Memory is the “capacity that permits organisms to benefit from their past experiences” (p. 385)
Keywords
Encoding:
A memory process involving the transformation of information to be remembered in to a form that can be stored in memory
Storage:
The process of placing information in long-term memory
Rehearsal:
A process that enables the individual to transfer information from the working memory to long-term memory
Retrieval:
A memory process involving the search through long-term memory for information needed to perform the task at hand
Long-Term Memory
- A component system in the structure of memory that serves as a relatively permanent storage repository for information
- Storage: Seemingly limitless
- Capacity: Seemingly limitless
- Procedural Memory: Relates specifically to storing and retrieving information about motor skills. (Tulving, 1985)
Working Memory
- Working memory is defined as “the cognitive mechanisms capable of retaining a small amount of information in an active state for use in ongoing tasks” (Baddeley, 2007)
- Working Memory Capacity refers to “the capacity to selectively maintain and manipulate goal-relevant information without getting distracted by irrelevant information over short intervals”
Working Memory: Storage
Two characteristics of working memory which are essential to the storage of information:
- Duration = 20-30s
- Capacity = 7+- 2
Perceptual-Cognitive Expertise
- The contribution of perceptual-cognitive processes to the development of sport expertise
Expert athletes perform better than non-experts on sport-specific perceptual-cognitive tests of:
- Memory for sport-specific environmental information (working memory)
- Attention and attentional allocation (attentional control)
- Perception or information pick-up (visual behaviors)
- Anticipation and decision-making skills
- Response accuracy: Number of appropriate responses according to objective standards, environmental constraints and task demands
- Response time: The elapsed time between stimulus onset and the overt production of a response (i.e., reaction time)
- Number of visual fixations: Search characteristics representative of the most pertinent cues used to facilitate the decision making process
- Duration of visual fixations: Indicative of the amount of information thought to b extracted from the visual scene
Concentration Principles (Moran, 1996)
- Athletes must decide to concentrate – it will not happen accidentally
- Athletes can focus on only one thought
at a time - Athletes’ minds are “focused” when they are
doing what they are thinking - Athletes ”lose” their concentration when they focus on factors that are outside their control
- Athletes should focus outwards when they
become nervous
Focusing Attention
INTERNAL FOCUS (IF):
Where attention is directed towards the performer’s own body movements (e.g., “focus on wrist flexion”)
EXTERNAL FOCUS (EF):
Where attention is directed towards the effect those body movements have on the environment (e.g., “focus on the basket”)
- Nideffer’s (1993) Attentional Focus Model
Attentional Control Components (Moran, 2004)
- An athlete’s ability to control their attention is a crucial differentiating factor between success & failure
- Concentration: Deliberate decision to invest mental effort in things deemed important in a given moment
- Selectivity of perception: Ability to attend to a particular source of information while ignoring distractions
- Divided attention: Ability to coordinate two or more actions at the same time
Attentional Control Theory
- (Eysenck et al., 2007)
- Attentional Control Theory in Sport ((Harris et al., 2019)
Visual Behaviors in Sport
- Valenko et al. (2020)
- Vater et al. (2020)
Skilled Anticipation
- The ability to anticipate what will happen next is critical to performance in sport
- Anticipation is based on interactions between three perceptual-cognitive skills
- (Williams & Jackson, 2019)
Decision-Making
- Decision-making refers to “the process of making a choice from a set of options, with the consequences of that choice being crucial” (Bar-Eli et al., 2011)
- Decision-making ability based on use of situational information + knowledge possessed about situation (Willams & Ford, 2013)
Reaction Time
- Reaction Time is the time between the onset of a stimulus (single) or stimuli (choice) and the initiation of a movement (Magill & Anderson, 2010)
- A quick and accurate reaction time can be the difference between winning and losing in sport
Central Capacity Theory of Attention (Kahneman, 1973)
Attention = “cognitive effort”
Capacity limits vary
- Environment (e.g., competition vs training)
- Task (e.g., simple vs complex)
- Individual (e.g., expert vs novice)
Assessing Attentional Demands of Activities
Dual-Task Techniques (Magill & Anderson, 2010)
Secondary-Task Technique:
- Example = Whilst dribbling a football
through cones the individual must count backwards from 300 in 7s
- Focus = The focus is on the secondary
task which is a continuous task
- Aim = The aim is to see the disruption it causes to the primary task
Probe-Reaction Time Technique:
- Example = As a person is taking a free throw in basketball, he or she must listen through earphones for a tone or “beep” sound and verbally respond when they hear it
- Focus = The focus is on the primary task. The
secondary task is a discrete task
- Aim = The aim is to see the difference between base level reaction time on the secondary task compared to dual task reaction time
