COGNITION IN ELITE FOOTBALLERS PART 5

 

As per rental life, I moved house once again last week + don't have internet until tomorrow or the next day so here's 2 posts in 1 on the Cognition in Elite Footballers study.

Today we look at pattern recognition and anticipation.

• Pattern Recognition is central for the development of expertise
• Skilled players show no difference in memory performance for videos of play situations with abstract displays/fully detailed videos but there is a significant gap with lesser skilled players  indicating that experts are better at picking up abstract structural play configurations v lesser skilled who rely on more superficial sensory features
• Dynamical motion aspects of the patterns, not static configurations, differentiated experts from lesser skilled observers
• Relative, not absolute, motion patterns are crucial
• Centrally located attacking players seem to be especially critical for experts indicated by the number of eye movements directed at these players as well as by experimental removal of player stimuli which shows that movements of central attacking players hold essential information
• For a given position, there are a great variety of playing patterns relevant to expert performance
• Pattern recognition is highly relevant to anticipation since you can predict the play and react earlier and eye tracking data indicated visual search strategies that both show similarities/differences when performing anticipatory and recognition tasks + athlete's report on more sophisticated memory representations when anticipating v when recognising and although they overlap, they are functionally distinct from each other
• Anticipation is the ability to predict actions and is a part of stage 1 with prediction about consequences of your actions in stage 2
• Serves to provide accurate predictions of how a situation might change in the next few seconds and soccer players rely on postural cues to predict the opposition as skilled athletes outperform lesser skilled on postural tasks in accurate responses and the time they can respond in
• They are also better at anticipating deceptive moves and at generating relevant action options for the opposition + verbal statements of higher complexity about their own thought processes during anticipation
• At the neurophysiological level, these processes may be supported by mirror neuron systems
• On top of postural cues, skilled athletes also use the opposition players action tendencies or the opposition team's structural knowledge
• The provision of contextual priors through knowledge about opposition action tendencies benefitted anticipation for both novice/expert players but when opposition acted against their tendency then a detrimental effect was observed for novices suggesting experts are more skilled at determining when contextual information should be relied upon or not
• Skilled and lesser skilled athletes both learn/benefit from opposition action tendencies when anticipating but when opposition tendencies change then only skilled players adapted to their expectations
• Knowledge of opposition action tendencies is important for anticipation so teams should develop this as shared knowledge
• When varying the reliability of video clips, experts employ a Bayesian probability-based strategy when anticipating
• Skilled players possess a greater advantage in postural anticipation and if postural cues are reliable then they will primarily base their anticipatory judgement on this source of information
• Although initially relying on contextual information, experts will switch to postural cues right before an opposition’s action is executed when kinematic information is most reliable v not observed in novices
• When kinematic information is unreliable due to a greater distance from the action, early occlusion or other manipulation, contextual priors of low/high reliability as well as structural information take precedence in anticipation
• Experts utilise multiple sources of information when anticipating and their superior performance is from an ability to adapt their anticipation strategy depending on the relative reliability of the different information sources
• Reaction is a response to an already unfolding event v anticipation is a prediction of an event that may occur with some probability
• Athletes also need to learn to react to cues that appear ambiguous to an untrained observer but almost always precede a certain outcome
• Visual information becomes more reliable the closer it is to execution of the action being anticipated
• Again experts rely on postural cues right before action execution and this very late perceptual information is extremely useful when the opposition makes a deceptive move
• If experts wait until the last moment to anticipate then are they really anticipating or simply reacting once the opposition can no longer inhibit a certain response as goal keepers rely on reaction rather then anticipation when defending shots
• There is a trade off between speed/anticipation and accuracy/reaction where speed/anticipation allows you to respond to the opposition action quicker but the response may be ineffectual if perceptual information is unreliable v reacting may allow a player to respond to an opposition action more accurately but the response time may come too late to be effective
• Anticipation can work for you or against you depending on the situation and while for some actions it may be better to wait/react, for others it may occur so quickly that a player must rely on anticipation instead
• Skilled are better at anticipating than lesser skilled via postural cues, contextual information and strategic knowledge of patterns but it remains uncertain how much is enhances performance and might be most useful when it is relied upon flexibly depending on the circumstances
• When teammate/opposition actions occur too quickly to allow for a reaction, anticipation can be a useful way to create an understanding of the current play situation and allow for earlier initiation of the next phase of the perception-action cycle and thus action selection