Lecture 4 - Anticipation & Decision Making - Tagged
Lecture 4 - Anticipation & Decision Making - Tagged
Rob Gray
More than meets the eye:
• Last time we saw that expert athletes are
often better at searching their environments
to pick out crucial visual information.
• But, often times it seems like great athletes
know what’s going to happen before these
visual cues are available.
– E.g., great hitters know where the ball is going
before it leaves the pitcher’s hand.
More than meets the eye:
• How do they achieve these magic feats?
Just what do they know that we don’t?
More than meets the eye:
STM LTM
Retrieval
Environment
Rehearsal
Sport Memory Research:
• Basketball (Allard et al., 1980)
– Showed experts and non-players
photographs of game situations
for 4 sec.
– Subjects were asked to remember
locations of players in photograph.
– Two types of scenes:
• Structured – picture taken during
play.
• Unstructured – scene during a time-
out.
Sport Memory Research:
• Basketball (Allard et al., 1980)
– Results: Experienced basketball players could
accurately remember 8/10 players for
structured scenes while non-players could
only remember 5. Evidence for chunking,
leading to better encoding.
– There was no difference for the
unstructured.
– Key point: show advantage in memory that is
very specific to their sport. Don’t just have a
generally better memory!
Sport Memory Research:
• Is this superior memory performance the
result of just more experience seeing
these type of scenes OR do you actually
have to play to get this improvement?
• Williams & David (1995).
– Compared memory performance for skilled
soccer players and wheelchair-bound fans
who had watched many games live and on
T.V. but had never played.
Sport Memory Research:
• Williams & David (1995).
– Results: skilled players showed better ability
to recall compared with avid fans.
– Suggests that the memory advantage is
something they have developed through
practice and is not simply a by-product of
experience with the sport.
Sport Memory Research:
• Bottom Line: Skilled athletes have larger
knowledge base of sports specific
information due to superior memory
processes.
– But do they make use of this information?
Anticipation: Advance Cues
• A major component of anticipating what
will happen is the use of advance cues –
visual information that allows you to
predict what will happen before the
action begins
– E.g., the pitcher’s body language in baseball.
– Often essential to successful performance
because the action happens so fast!
Advance Cues: Body Language
Biting tongue
= fastball
Slower arm
motion
= changeup More white of ball visible
= fastball
60 fastballs
changeups
TEMPORAL ERROR
55
50
MEAN TEMPORAL
45
40
35
MEAN
30
25
0_1 1_0 1_1 0_2 2_0 1_2 3_0
PITCH COUNT
PSY 449- Human Factors in Sport – 21
Rob Gray
Use of Situational Probabilities:
• Gray (2002). Virtual baseball batting.
– Hitters also use the frequency of events to
anticipate the upcoming pitch.
– If a pitcher is throwing a lot of the same pitch,
the hitter will come to expect the same pitch
next time. Get similar results with racquet
sports.
– Emphasizes why it is important to key your
opponent off balance.
Use of Situational Probabilities:
• Gray (2002). Virtual baseball batting.
0.8 F, F, F, F
MEAN SPATIAL ERROR m
0.7 F, F, F, S
0.6 EXPT. 1
0.5
0.4
0.3
0.2
0.1
0
1 2 3 4 5 6
BATTER
PSY 449- Human Factors in Sport – 23
Rob Gray
Use of Situational Probabilities:
• This type of knowledge is also used on an
individual level.
– E.g., knowing that your opponent in basketball
‘goes right’ most of the time when starting
from the top of the key.
Decision Making:
• It’s great that expert athletes have all of this
extra information available but they still need
to decide what to do with it!
– Several studies (on basketball, hockey & field
hockey) have shown that experts make more
accurate decisions when shown photographs of
different sports situations. They are also usually
faster in making decisions.
– Most likely they have developed an elaborate set
of {if x then y} type of rules that they can quickly
pull up.
Decision Making: Brain Cramps
• But this isn’t always the case!
• There have been some very famous
bonehead decisions in sport.
– Ian Woosnam was once penalized 2 strokes in
the British Open for carrying 15 clubs instead of
14!
– We will talk about these failures in performance
in a few weeks.
Brain Activity & Anticipation:
• It is possible to measure brain activity while
someone is performing a sporting skill.
– Uses Electroencephalography (EEG)
• measures all of the electrical activity in the brain, not
from a specific area.
• when a brain wave is measured for a particular event
(like the pitcher releasing the ball), it is called an event
related potential (ERP).
• if you collect enough measurements you can identify
peaks & troughs in the electrical activity.
The P300:
• A wave of
positive
electrical activity
that occurs
roughly 300
msec after a
stimulus
appears.
Brain Activity & Anticipation:
• The latency of the P300 (how long it takes
to occur; e.g. 290ms vs. 310ms) is related
to the time required to recognize and
classify the object.
• The amplitude of the P300 is related to
task difficulty.
– easy tasks have a very small amplitude.
P300 Predictions:
• Because skilled athletes rely more on
advance cues, situational probabilities etc.
than on perceptual cues
– they should have shorter P300 latencies
• Because skills are easier for skilled
athletes
– they should have smaller P300 amplitudes
P300 Results:
• Suggests that intermediate batters are less
efficient in their perceptual-decision making
processes due to limitations in their
attentional capacity.
– Will take more about this next time…
“Sports Software”: A Summary
• In general, we have seen that expert
athletes:
1. Are faster and more accurate in recognizing
patterns of play.
2. Search the visual field more quickly and
economically.
3. Are superior at anticipating actions on the basis
of advance visual cues.
“Sports Software”: A Summary