COGNITION IN ELITE FOOTBALLERS PART 4

                                                                

So far we've covered the basics of stage 1, 2 and 3 in regards to cognition on footballers and now we double, even triple, down on detail so the future posts in this series  have the potential to be quite long!

Stage 1 - Assessment of the Current Play Situation

Visual Orientation and Attention

• Visual + relevant visual stimuli surrounding players in all directions via eye movements, head turns and whole body movements
• Orientation behavior is linked to attentional functions which guide exploratory movements to ensure that the most relevant information is focused on and perceived
• Visual attention is typically directed on the ball, opposition/teammate positions, open/closed spaces on the field or postural clues for anticipating the actions of others which guides the player’s orientation behavior but are weighted by events that occur during the visual exploration meaning the relation between orientation behavior/attention is highly interactive
• Conscious intentions such as specific instructions may also influence orienting behavior by way of executive control processes
• Skilled players search the visual surroundings for more relevant informatioin, flexibly adapting to current play situations + make shorter/more fixations when the ball was far away to perceive the general pattern of play but when the ball is close they made fewer fixations of long duration and focuses on postural cues of the possession player to predict the next movement v lesser skilled players who simply look at the ball in both situations
• Individual differences in creativity are related to visual search strategies x making short fixations of informative locations and a reflection of broader attentional focus
• Individual differences in working memory can also be relevant for visual orientation behavior but does not differ from groups with different working memory capacity as measured by object tracking
• Superior perceptual abilities leads to better anticipation accompanied by employing distinct visual search strategies
• Both players will fixate on the ball and the player in possession of it which aligns with a reliance on postural cues but experts do this far less indicating superior integration of other sources of information
• When provided with contextual priors via opposition action tendencies, experts spend far more time watching other elements in their visual field than the possession player v novices
• When the main action is far away, skilled players focus less on the possession player and more on other surrounding subjects
• Elite players incorporate multiple sources of information when anticipating and can adjust their strategy depending on the quality of available information
• Most visual research is lab-based which does not always match up with real-life sport
• Game specific data shows that head turn frequency is related to faster processing time
• Central midfielders/defenders scan more and forwards the least
• Less scanning under tight opposition pressure/close to opposition goal
• Probability of successful passing increases with scan frequency but not large but it still has a positive role in elite performance
• The amount of visual exploratory activities in relation to the penultimate pass predicted the adequacy of the subsequent pass by the player
• Midfielders make more visual exploration activities then defenders/forwards
• Eye movement patterns vary  with attacking/defensive phases as well as situational complexity with longer fixations when they were a high number of areas of interest (ball, teammate, opposition) were present in the visual field suggesting longer processing time is required when more information is available
• Scan times are way shorter then during lab testing, questioning study validity
• Visual orientation behavior/related attentional processes vary systematically with the play situation as well as individual player characteristics like creativity
• Skilled players focus their attention on the most informative aspects of the situation which can vary in several ways
• Most studies focus on players with the ball, not away from the ball