COGNITION IN ELITE FOOTBALLERS PART 6

                                                 

We had the internet connected at the new house for a second or 2 before it cut back out so again I've only sparingly watched any footy on TV (went to 2 games live though!) so no game analysis until next week unless I can catch up on some games during the week so it's part 6 of the Cognition in Elite Footballers study where we're  still looking at the stage 1 which is the assessment of the current play situation which has covered visual orientation and attention, pattern recognition and anticipation with the final piece of this puzzle, working memory, being the focus today.

• Working memory serves as the store for information that makes up the situational assessment of stage 1 and through working memory the assessment is carried over to stage 2 where it activates representations in procedural long term memory
• Within stage 2 working memory contributes to conscious executive processes that bias the action selection process
• There is a link between multi-object tracking ability and more successful passes
• Strategic team sport athletes tend to exhibit better executive functioning, including working memory, than athletes from non-strategic sports as well as a higher workload capacity during fast decision making
• Lower working memory capacity is related to how much a player will be distracted by irrelevant information during games where auditory distractions impact performance negatively for elite/novices on a tactical decision making task and the beneficial effects of prior contextual information on decision making is lessened when a distractor-task must be performed simultaneously showing that the degree of load on working memory is important to performance
• Experts can bypass the normal capacity limitations of working memory by relying on other memory systems to perform tasks quicker/more efficiently
• Extensive experience facilitates a separate domain-specific long term memory system that can quickly retrieve/apply game relevant-information/patterns from long term memory with no additional load to working memory and may be closely related to pattern recognition skills
• Skilled players generate, classify and recognise game situations quicker then lesser skilled and can recall information from past matches with greater accuracy
• Skilled also apply more advanced memory representations to sport-related problem solving
• Experts develop a domain-specific executive system which can quickly retrieve/apply game-relevant information from long term memory and when showed a soccer-related picture which is later shown again to prompt a decision, it can lower the response time for that decision
• With shorter intervals between prime and decision, a priming effect was shown for novice/experts but as working memory was overloaded with the a secondary task, the priming effect remained only for experts
• Experts can efficiently utilise a separate memory system when information has not been registered consciously or when working memory is overloaded
• Novices/experts relied on working memory to a similar degree when solving problems
• Rather than more efficient encoding/retrieval of visual information, experts have superior attention allocation/perceptual ability.
• When working memory is overloaded, performance drops and skilled players can perform better on working memory task
• Highly experienced players re-delegate information normally processed by working memory to a separate domain-specific memory system but the evidence is mixed and it seems they still rely on working memory to a large extent
• It’s hard to disentangle the involvement of working memory in guiding perception/attention  (stage 1) from its role in influencing response selection (stage 2)