Abstract
It is well reported that expert athletes have refined perceptual-cognitive skills and fixate on more informative areas during representative tasks. These perceptual-cognitive skills are also crucial to performance within the domain of sports officials. We examined the visual scan patterns of elite and sub-elite association football referees while assessing foul play situations. These foul play situations (open play and corner kick situations) were presented on a Tobii T120 Eye Tracking monitor. The elite referees made more accurate decisions and differences in their visual search behaviors were observed. For the open play situations, referees in the elite group spent significantly more time fixating the most informative area of the attacking player (contact zone) and less time fixating the body part that was not involved in the infringement (non-contact zone). Furthermore, the average total fixation time in the contact zone and non-contact zone tended to differ between the elite and sub-elite referees in corner kick situations. In conclusion, elite level referees have learned to discern relevant from less-relevant information in the same way as expert athletes. Findings have implications for the development of perceptual training programs for sport officials.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s41235-016-0013-8) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
Highlights
To achieve expert performance in many sports, welldeveloped motor skills are required and athletes have to adapt their movements continuously to meet the everchanging demands of the performance environment
A significant main effect of situation was observed [F(1,37) = 46.172, P < 0.001, ηp2 = 0.555]; the accuracy scores for the open play situations (mean (M) = 52.6, SE = 2.54) were significantly lower compared with the corner kick situations (M = 72.9, SE = 1.12)
We predicted, based on previous research involving the analysis of referees’ decisions, that there would be systematic expertise-based differences in the decision-making accuracy (Catteeuw et al, 2009; Gilis et al, 2008; Hancock & Ste-Marie, 2013; Mascarenhas et al, 2005). For both the open play and corner kick situations, our results showed that the decisions of the elite group were more accurate than the sub-elite group
Summary
To achieve expert performance in many sports, welldeveloped motor skills are required and athletes have to adapt their movements continuously to meet the everchanging demands of the performance environment. Spitz et al Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications (2016) 1:12 often precedes appropriate action and over recent years more knowledge has been gathered about the contribution of perceptual-cognitive skills to expert performance (Williams & Ericsson, 2005). According to Ericsson and Kintsch (1995), expert performers develop long-term working memory (LTWM) skills as a result of accumulated deliberate practice, which allow them to retrieve critical and taskrelevant information from long-term memory in an efficient way. These elaborated retrieval skills ensure control over strategic aspects of performance execution
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