Position-Specific Attentional Skills in Team Sports: A Comparison between Defensive and Offensive Football Players

Stefanie Klatt,Josef Nerb

doi:10.3390/app11135896

Abstract

Over the last few decades, technical as well as cognitive skills and their relation to position-specific skill requirements have been extensively investigated as indicators for players’ performance in team sports. To explore the impact of positioning in football on inattentional blindness we employed dynamic tasks that presented an unexpected object and analyzed its noticing rates in three different experiments. In Experiment 1, amateur and expert football players performed a well-established inattentional blindness task of counting the number of times a basketball was passed between two groups while an unexpected, non-sport specific object was introduced to the situation. Noticing rates were higher for strikers compared to players of other playing positions. The findings support a position-specific advantage regarding inattentional blindness for more offensive players compared to more defensive players. Using the same inattentional blindness task, this finding was investigated in Experiment 2 in more detail, i.e., by differentiating between more playing positions. Results revealed that offensive players (in particular strikers) observed unexpected objects more frequently than defensive players. Experiment 3 used a newly developed football-specific task requiring participants to find solutions in different game situations with an unexpected free-standing player appearing in one of these situations. Defensive players again showed more inattentional blindness than offensive players (in particular offensive mid-fielders), i.e., offensive players perceived the unmarked player more often. This indicates that players not only differ in the conscious perception of unexpected objects that are irrelevant to the sport as a function of their playing position, but also show differences when the perception of the unexpected relevant object is useful for finding tactical solutions in a given game situation. Our findings provide further insight into the importance of the definition of position-specific skill requirements in team sports.

Highlights

This article is an open access articleWhen people focus their attention on something, they often fail to notice unexpected occurrences, even if they happen right in front of them
As team sport players are usually exposed to a whole range of different environmental influences and various stimuli that they have to perceive on the playing field, it is hardly surprising that single pieces of information are sometimes overlooked when the attentional focus is on other stimuli in that moment
Other players cant relationship between the players’ playing position and their likelihood of showing inattentional blindness: strikers saw the gorillabetween more often thangroups the players on other posiNo significant difference was discernible the two

Summary

Introduction

This article is an open access articleWhen people focus their attention on something, they often fail to notice unexpected occurrences, even if they happen right in front of them. As team sport players are usually exposed to a whole range of different environmental influences and various stimuli that they have to perceive on the playing field, it is hardly surprising that single pieces of information are sometimes overlooked when the attentional focus is on other stimuli in that moment. This can be explained by the fact that humans have a limited information-processing capacity, and it is important to primarily focus on the most task-relevant or situation-relevant information for the most optimum outcome [6,7]. Strikers often receive passes from behind the optimum position for scoring, while running up to the opponents’ goal and while teammates and opponents may be positioned to their left, right, behind them, and in front of them

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