No abstract

Attacking phases in team handball are highly dynamic, characterized by fast movements and a high frequency of fast passes with the aim to score a goal. Consequently, the opposing/defending team tries to prevent successful offensive actions by restraining the offensive opportunities and the probabilities of scoring a goal. According to the rules, defensive players are allowed to use body contact (e.g. with bent arms) to get in and keep their optimal defending position. If such a contact is not in line with the rules (e.g. clutching or pushing) and results in a turnover of ball possession, a foul is called and a free-throw awarded. However, there is a lack of research answering the question if a permitted foul (without personal sanction) is an effective way to increase the probability of defending the own goal successfully, because afterwards the attacking team keeps possession of the ball. Thus, we investigated 1052 attacking phases during games at the elite level to verify whether fouls committed by a defender influenced successful attacking (goal vs. no goal). It was found that when the attack was interrupted by a permitted foul, 50.60% of the attacks ended with a goal. Yet, when no foul was committed, only 47.09% of the attacks ended with a goal, however, the analysis revealed that this difference was not significant. Therefore, we concluded that neither a strategy of stopping offensive actions by body contact nor avoiding fouls and focusing only on intercepting the ball were favourable solutions in successful defending in team handball. It seems effective to implement a defence strategy with clearly defined fouling zones and situations, to deal with the tactical possibility of permitted fouls in handball. This idea and further considerations are discussed for sports practice.

Conscious perception often fails when an object appears unexpectedly and our attention is focused elsewhere (inattentional blindness). Although various factors have been identified that modulate the likelihood of this failure of awareness, it is not clear whether the monetary reward value associated with an object can affect whether or not this object is detected under conditions of inattention. We hypothesised that unexpectedly appearing objects that contain a feature linked to high value, as established via reward learning in a previous task, would subsequently be detected more frequently than objects containing a feature linked to low value. A total of 537 participants first learned the association between a perceptual feature (colour) and subsequent reward values (high, low, or none reward). Afterwards, participants were randomly assigned to a static (Experiment 1) or dynamic (Experiment 2) inattentional blindness task including an unexpected object associated with high, low, or none reward. However, no significant effect of the previously learned value on the subsequent likelihood of detection was observed. We speculate that artificial monetary value, which is known to affect attentional capture, is not strong enough to determine whether or not an object is consciously perceived.

During the past two decades, the interest in investigating the phenomenon of inattentional blindness strongly increased and resulted in a fraying of paradigms investigating this specific failure of awareness. We reviewed 129 full-text articles containing 219 experiments for their design and methods to create awareness for the growing variety of inattentional blindness paradigms. Also, we promote a deliberate use of future paradigms (proposedly based on their functionality and representativeness) to improve the transferability of research findings to the real world. In general, we argue that paradigms should be well-chosen based on the respective purpose, as the concept of inattentional blindness represents most likely several subtypes with different underlying mechanisms rather than a single phenomenon. Finally, we propose to include expectancy as a continuous variable into the definition of inattentional blindness rather than using it as an exclusion criterion.

Although human perception has evolved into a potent and efficient system, we still fall prey to astonishing failures of awareness as we miss an unexpected object in our direct view when our attention is engaged elsewhere (inattentional blindness). While specific types of value of the unexpected object have been identified to modulate the likelihood of this failure of awareness, it is not clear whether the effect of value on inattentional blindness can be generalized. We hypothesized that the combination of hunger and food-stimuli might increase a more general type of value so that food stimuli have a higher probability to be noticed by hungry participants than by satiated participants. In total, 240 participants were assigned towards a hungry (16 h of fasting) or satiated (no fasting) manipulation and performed afterward a static inattentional blindness task. However, we did not find any effect of value on inattentional blindness based on hunger and food stimuli. We speculate that different underlying mechanisms are involved for different types of value and that value manipulations need to be strong enough to ensure certain value strengths.