Expert-novice differences in gymnastic judging: an information-processing perspective

Abstract

The expertise paradigm has been used within the sport domain at the level of the athlete (e.g. Abernethy et al., 1994; Starkes et al., 1994) and the coach (e.g. Côté et al., 1995a). Research into the qualities of expertise and its development in judges of sport performance, however, has been very limited. The present research examined various sport-specific cognitive attributes that were predicted to lead to an expert advantage in gymnastic judging. Twelve novice and expert gymnastic judges were compared on a number of domain-specific tasks. Expert judges were significantly better at perceptually anticipating upcoming gymnastic elements from advance information. Also, gymnastic elements that were correctly anticipated were judged more accurately than those that had been anticipated incorrectly. Experts also exhibited significantly greater depth and breadth in their declarative knowledge base. These findings are consistent with other expertise research that has shown the expert advantage to be related to acquired processing strategies (e.g. Abernethy et al., 1994). An information-processing perspective is adopted to discuss these advantages in terms of training strategies and changes to the current gymnastic judging system. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.