Abstract
Two core elements for the coordination of different actions in sport are tactical information and knowledge about tactical situations. The current study describes two experiments to learn about the memory structure and the cognitive processing of tactical information. Experiment 1 investigated the storage and structuring of team-specific tactics in humans’ long-term memory with regard to different expertise levels. Experiment 2 investigated tactical decision-making skills and the corresponding gaze behavior, in presenting participants the identical match situations in a reaction time task. The results showed that more experienced soccer players, in contrast to less experienced soccer players, possess a functionally organized cognitive representation of team-specific tactics in soccer. Moreover, the more experienced soccer players reacted faster in tactical decisions, because they needed less fixations of similar duration as compared to less experienced soccer players. Combined, these experiments offer evidence that a functionally organized memory structure leads to a reaction time and a perceptual advantage in tactical decision-making in soccer. The discussion emphasizes theoretical and applied implications of the current results of the study.
Highlights
Tactical skills describe the ability of certain players to judge and decide for upcoming game situations appropriately [1]
Cluster 1 integrates all match situation related to the team-specific tactic ‘change sides’, and Cluster 2 all situations of ‘counter-attack’
The current study examined the cognitive representation of team-specific tactics in soccer
Summary
Tactical skills describe the ability of certain players to judge and decide for upcoming game situations appropriately [1]. The evaluation of the verbal reports of thinking (i.e., non-structured protocols expressed verbally after the observation of match situations) indicate that more advanced cognitive representations enable more experienced players to retrieve relevant information in order to make appropriate task-specific judgments [12]. The aforementioned studies in sport tactics revealed that experienced soccer players make faster decisions, and their decisions are of higher quality than those of inexperienced soccer players It remains unclear whether this superior decision-making skill bases on the expert’s early detection of relevant cues or on their ability to process the perceived information more effectively. The current study focusses on the research question, which kind of gaze control enables experienced soccer players to decide for match situations affording selected team-specific tactics. The present study addresses two questions: Are there expertise-related differences between soccer players regarding their cognitive representation of team-specific tactics? More experienced soccer players are able to determine an appropriate team-specific tactic faster than less experienced based on their gaze behavior
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