Abstract
This paper aimed at comparing expert and novice volleyball players in a visuomotor task using realistic stimuli. Videos of a volleyball setter performing offensive action were presented to participants, while their eye movements were recorded by a head-mounted video based eye tracker. Participants were asked to foresee the direction (forward or backward) of the setter's toss by pressing one of two keys. Key-press response time, response accuracy, and gaze behaviour were measured from the first frame showing the setter's hand-ball contact to the button pressed by the participants. Experts were faster and more accurate in predicting the direction of the setting than novices, showing accurate predictions when they used a search strategy involving fewer fixations of longer duration, as well as spending less time in fixating all display areas from which they extract critical information for the judgment. These results are consistent with the view that superior performance in experts is due to their ability to efficiently encode domain-specific information that is relevant to the task.
Highlights
Sport expertise has been defined as the ability to consistently demonstrate superior athletic performance
If one cue is more important than the sum of the others, experts can use this knowledge, which they gain from experience, and stop searching after considering one cue
A repeated measures analyses of variance (ANOVA) was conducted on the proportion of correct responses in which setting directions were the within-subjects factors and expertise the between-subjects factor
Summary
Sport expertise has been defined as the ability to consistently demonstrate superior athletic performance. In a successful sport performance, knowing where and when to look may be crucial, especially when the scene is wide and information relevant to the task can be presented in different forms and locations. The differences in visual search strategy, that is, the ability to quickly locate task-relevant information between expert and novice players, in one sport may be inconsistent with those of others [6]. Anticipation is an important part in sports expertise; it refers to the ability to predict what is likely to happen prior to the event itself. This ability to “read the play” is essential in sport where the speed of the game means that decisions must typically be made in advance of an opponent’s action. In certain situations it is conceivable that players may rely exclusively on the ability
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