These notes comes from this study released in June of this year, looking at the perceptual-cognitive skills of expert and non-expert officials.
As coaches and players I believe it's crucial to know that the decision-making process of umpires is exactly the same as players and coaches, as you'll read in these notes.
This knowledge and and the why's behind it should give you a greater handle on how you deal with umpiring decisions, knowing somewhat how and why they were made.
Throughout this post you can quite easily replace the word "umpires" with "players", and this all holds true.
- The number of fixations reflects proficiency in the perceptual task as well as the level of visual information collected and the stability of visual control, with fewer fixations indicating more efficiency at extracting information
- Experts fixations are significantly lower than non-experts
- In a study of athlete visual search strategies, the number of fixations decreased as athleticism increased
- Reduced fixations comes from the perceptual-cognitive advantage from having more experience, enabling them to conduct effective visual searches focusing on the most important/critical area of information in the motor situation, requiring less fixations – and the same happens for officials
- Longer fixation duration was not supported which reflects the efficiency of the officials attention allocation/information processing
- Longer duration fixations usually result in greater information extraction leading to more accurate/rational decision making but that could also be from them needing to get more information from lack of experience
- Some research indicates that high sustained attention is not critical which also means that the duration of fixations is not yet a valid indicator for distinguishing between experts and non-experts
- The process is perception, information categorisation/integration then decision making
- Early information collection is critical to good decision making
- There are 4 main factors that can influence perceptual - cognitive skills of officials
- #1 x task anticipation behavior which leads to differences in information perception which expends fewer resources/uses more effective visual search strategies to scan relevant environmental information, allowing them to direct their vision earlier to concentrate on zones where potential infringements might occur which decreases the amount of fixations and increases decision making accuracy v non experts who display limited knowledge/experience leading to extensive information gathering through various visual search behavior resulting in more fixations/lower efficiency in collecting information, lowering decision making accuracy
- #2 x diff methods of memory retrieval lead to differences in information processing where experts appear to be able to retain experience/knowledge from long term memory and then quickly extract it when needed to perform actions with speed/accuracy
- Decision making begins with perceiving the stimulus, then its encoded, interpreted and categorised assisted by long term memory and then the official integrates the perceived stimulus/information with their retrieved memories and any additional information into their decision making
- As performers become experts, they can use their working memory more effectively and have more refined information retrieval strategies/processing methods
- Experts demonstrate fewer fixations/higher decision making accuracy v non-experts who have limited content stored in their long term memory and rely more on random visual behavior to collect information when faced with unfamiliar/complex tasks
- #3 x information reduction strategy leads to differences in sources of information and it's suggested that experts are able to optimise the amount of information processed through selective gaze behavior, ignoring task-irrelevant information and actively focusing on task-relevant information, again decreasing fixations and lessening information-processing load
- #4 x differences in perceptual-cognitive skills are linked to the particular sport/task nature where officials can be categorised into interactors, monitors and reactors based on the amount of interactions with athlete movement demands and in the number of cues being observed
- Sports like basketball and soccer involve high interactions/physical movement demands and often a large number of cues to process
- Sports like volleyball and gymnastics involve monitors with low to medium interaction/physical demands but often a medium to large number of cues to monitor
- Tennis line judges are reactors with low interactions/movement demands and a low to medium number of cues to track
- Reactors make judgments based on objective facts without the involvement of perceptual - cognitive skills
- Interactors need to pay attention to the large number of different targets/cues in addition to frequent movements/interactions during officiating
- This also renders the visual search task of officials more intricate, with greater uncertainty in decision making
