Abstract
The temporal occlusion paradigm is often used in anticipation and decision-making research in sports. Although it is considered as a valid measurement tool, evidence of its reproducibility is lacking but required for future cross-sectional and repeated-measures designs. Moreover, only a few studies on decision making in real-world environments exist. Here, we aimed at (a) implementing a temporal occlusion test with multi-dimensional motor response characteristics, and (b) assessing intra- and inter-session item reliability. Temporally occluded videos of attack sequences in a team handball scenario were created and combined with the SpeedCourt® contact plate system. Participants were instructed to perform pre-specified defensive actions in response to the video stimuli presented on a life-size projection screen. The intra- and inter-session (after at least 24 h) reproducibility of subjects’ motor responses were analyzed. Significant Cohen’s (0.44–0.54) and Fleiss’ (0.33–0.51) kappa statistics revealed moderate agreement of motor responses with the majority of attack situations in both intra- and inter-session analyses. Participants made faster choices with more visual information about the opponents’ unfolding action. Our findings indicate reliable decisions in a complex, near-game test environment for team handball players. The test provides a foundation for future temporal occlusion studies, including recommendations for new explanatory approaches in cognition research.
Highlights
In team sports, players use relevant visual cues of their opponents to score or prevent goals, or to position themselves advantageously for attack or defense
To investigate anticipation and decision making in laboratory settings, temporal occlusion (TO) [9] is a well-established paradigm that has been applied in several studies
Missing pairs resulted from the exclusion of videos with invalid motor responses
Summary
Players use relevant visual cues of their opponents to score or prevent goals, or to position themselves advantageously for attack or defense. To investigate anticipation and decision making in laboratory settings, temporal occlusion (TO) [9] is a well-established paradigm that has been applied in several studies. TO can be used to identify postural cues that influence predictions of future actions or to distinguish better and worse players [10,11,12]. Previous studies using this method have demonstrated that high-skill athletes outperform their low-skill counterparts in response quality, meaning that they can use less visual information to foresee intended movements in action sequences. TO was applied as an expert–novice paradigm in numerous sport disciplines, for example, in volleyball [14,15], squash [16], badminton [17], tennis [18] and field-hockey [19], to name a few
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