When we talk about the elite players, yes we're talking about physical abilities but what leads to those is perception.
The perception of what's happening around them (knowledge in the game) and patterns of play that have happened beforehand (knowledge of the game) that enables players to perceive and process game inf0rmation in a split second and leaving the opposition, and sometimes their teammates, in the dust.
These notes are taken from an article by Mark O'Sullivan, a coach and researcher from Norway that I came across the other week -a coach I have referenced before in my posts.
- We perceive to move and we move to perceive
- Flashing lights/eye tracking glasses encourage observable behaviour v functional perception misleading coaches into treating scanning as a skill of head turns/gaze fixations v an emergent property of interacting with a rich/information laden environment = the appearance of scanning but without the ability to detect actionable information
- Scanning reflects how players redistribute attention to inform action and is tracked by the frequency of head movements which only creates attentional orientation towards relevant information but it is reduced to a count of observable movement
- Head movements, gaze behaviour and scanning are not synonymous
- Gaze Behaviour x direction of central vision measured by eye tracking that indicates where/when an individual fixates but it does not reveal the perception of what is actually being perceived/used
- Peripheral vision is highly sensitive to motion (an overlapping teammate/opposition pressure) and plays a huge role in dynamic environments but is not captured/tracked so looking can’t mean there’s automatic seeing
- Head movements are easy to track but offer only indirect insight into perception
- True scanning needs to be understood as an embodied/embedded exploratory process through which performers seek information that specifies affordances in a dynamic environment
- More head/body movement does not mean more perception nor does fixation guarantee meaningful information pickup
- How can environments be designed so players must search for, detect and use relevant information?
- Scanning is not trained in isolation but emerges from engaging with representative/information-rich contexts
- Perception is shaped by the relationship between information/action capabilities and what a player sees is constrained by what they and others can do and teammates in turn, calibrate their own behaviour accordingly
- They can also be shaped by socio-cultural contexts
- Scanning is an active search for information specifying actionable possibilities, being guided by task demands, individual capabilities and culturally shaped expectations about what information matters
- Create environments where players need to search for information in order to succeed via designing tasks where relevant information may not always be available encouraging exploration
- Don’t train scanning itself but the conditions under which effective information pickup emerges
- Don’t improve scanning behaviour, improve the quality of perception-action coupling
- What does the environment demand that makes searching for information necessary?
