A developmental perspective on option generation and selection.

Abstract

Little is known about how children generate options for taking action in familiar situations or how they select which action option to actually perform. In this article, we explore the interplay between option generation and selection from a developmental perspective using sports as a testbed. In a longitudinal design with four measurement waves, we asked 6- to 13-year-old children (N = 73) to generate and select action options in a soccer-related task. Children generated and selected options in accordance with the predictions of the take-the-first heuristic, which served as a theoretical starting point: They generated only a few options in decreasing order of validity (i.e., better options were generated earlier) and selected the first options they had generated. Older children selected the first option generated more often than younger children and generated options faster. Longitudinal effects revealed that both age groups generated fewer options and faster across waves. Time limitation fostered fewer and higher quality options being generated and selected. Overall, our results highlight the importance of considering the predecisional process of option generation to deepen our understanding of developmental changes in decision-strategy use. Future research directions and implications for children’s real-life decision making are discussed.

Embodied Cognition With and Without Mental Representations: The Case of Embodied Choices in Sports

“…From the ecological dynamics perspective, representative design means that the actions and environmental constraints need to be representative of the person-environment interactions in the real world (Pinder et al, 2011). We recommend providing a more detailed description of task selection for designing studies (see Johnson and Raab, 2003) or including environmental constraints (Chow et al, 2011) such as time pressure within a task (Musculus et al, 2018).…”

“…A talent selection camp in which decisions to select or not to select a talent would be based on a list of heuristics. Knowing for each relevant heuristic how well talent is able to use it at a specific age makes it possible to use the heuristic for talent selection (Musculus et al, 2018). For talent development, this simple heuristic perspective would not isolate cognitive and motor training but would integrate them (Jackson and Farrow, 2005).…”

Setting the scientific stage for esports psychology: a systematic review

“…In the domain of sports, cognitive performance has been studied from two theoretical perspectives. Some have focussed on experts' performance, in particular on sport-specific cognitive processes (Musculus, Ruggeri, Raab, & Lobinger, 2019;Raab, Masters, & Maxwell, 2005;Voss et al, 2010), and others have taken a more general approach, focussing on cognitive processes that are common to all sports (Voss et al, 2010). In esports, the majority of studies have so far focussed instead on esports-general cognitive processes (e.g., Seya & Shinoda, 2016).…”

Movement Matters! Understanding the Developmental Trajectory of Embodied Planning

“…First, experimental designs should allow monitoring intra-individual changes and inter-individual differences throughout development. Intra-individual changes can be tested in longitudinal designs (Musculus et al, 2019 ), as well as in intervention and training studies (Harbourne and Berger, 2019 ). Inter-individual differences can be analyzed with cross-sectional comparisons of different age groups (Berger et al, 2015 ; Benson et al, 2018 ).…”