NEXT LEVEL COACHING – DECISION MAKING DURING GAMES: THOUGHT CLASSIFICATION (3/3)

                                     

No new terms today.

• Look at specific game moments in regards to no, fast and slow thought decisions in rugby such as a scrum for example which is slow thought where players referred to a checklist in response to game information formed from knowledge of the game, and what action is appropriate for where and how you’re positioned but also shared language that helps initiates how you intend to approach the scrum
• No thought implies that players often refer to having no time to perceive game information whilst during slow thought both groups allude to having increased time that provides an opportunity to view a global array of visual perceptual information, backing up that perception is task dependent as amateur player verbal descriptions change in line with different game situations
• Player’s in the immediate contest have minimal time to perceive and act on game information where a psychological refractory period may occur where players are unable to perceive a secondary source of game information so players must rely on the initial perception of discrete information in the local array, such as opposition movements and body positions
• Player’s just off the immediate contest are given time to perceive a global array of offensive and defensive pictures offered by their opposition, to communicate and collectively execute a decision for the next phase of play
• Within unsimulated fast and slow thought decisions, players were consciously aware of their physical and technical capabilities compared to no thought decisions where they weren’t, and thus relied on self-organisational responses which still resulted in positive outcomes most of the time
• For most no thought actions, players could not remember how or why they did what they did, simply reacting without thinking which may suggest that within these moments, the driving mechanism of decision making is a successful, or unsuccessful, forming of a direct online relationship between game information and their own technical and physical capabilities without the need for memory representation
• Player decision making was mostly fast thought where a player’s initial assessments of the game were inaccurate and they had to respond with a rapid ability to make sense of game information and a heightened capability to satisfy the situation by taking the 1^st option available to them
• No thought decisions occasionally presented evidence of subconscious decision making made through feel and reaction, showing a direct relationship between perception and action, where players self-organise their behavior implicitly in response to game information without the need for memory representations, and also providing evidence for neural embodiments of meaning, where representations are formed from a network of information

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