Pay attention! A review of visual attentional expertise in sport

The dark side of visual awareness in sport: Inattentional blindness in a real-world basketball task

“…Evidence from the attentional-orienting literature in the field of sport (for reviews, see Memmert, 2009;Nougier & Rossi, 1999) suggests that expert athletes seem to pay proportionally less attention to highly likely events and more attention to less likely events, which Nougier and Rossi interpreted as adopting an expectingthe-unexpected strategy. The basketball players in the present study did not seem to adopt this strategy.…”

“…Thus, one may conclude that, the higher the probability-for example, derived from instructions of a coach-of a specific event is, the greater the attention paid to it will be. Interestingly, the findings from the attentional-orienting literature in sports suggest otherwise by indicating that expert athletes seem to prefer to pay proportionally less attention to highly likely events and more attention to less likely events (for reviews, see Memmert, 2009;Nougier & Rossi, 1999).…”

Multiple measures of visual attention predict novice motor skill performance when attention is focused externally

“…One line of empirical evidence that is consistent with this notion comes from studies that have compared athletes from different sports and of different skill levels to non-athletes in terms of their performance on simple laboratory tasks. These studies consistently find benefits for athletes over non-athletes in tasks measuring visual attention orienting, selective attention, divided attention, and in tasks that generally measure processing speed (for reviews see Memmert, 2009;Voss, Kramer, Basak, Prakash, & Roberts, 2010), thus supporting the idea that a strong link exists between motor performance, attention, and higher-level cognitive functioning.…”

“…According to one classic theoretical framework, spatial orienting, alerting, and executive control have been implicated as distinct attentional operations (Posner & Petersen, 1990;Fan, McCandliss, Sommer, Raz, & Posner, 2002). One of the most widely studied components of attention in athletes has been the voluntary orienting of visual attention (Memmert, 2009), which is typically measured using laboratory tasks by comparing response times to visual targets that appear at validly cued locations to response times to targets at invalidly cued locations (i.e., the spatial cueing task; Posner, 1980). These studies have consistently found that athletes from a variety of different sports, ranging from professional boxers to volleyball players, exhibit more efficient attentional orienting (i.e., smaller differences between valid and invalid trials) compared to non-athletes (Castiello & Umilta, 1992;Nougier, Azemar, Stein, & Ripoll, 1992;Nougier, Ripoll, & Stein, 1989).…”

Using systems of eye movements recording in the psychological preparation of athletes

“…Теоретическому обзору феномена зрительного восприятия и его экспер-тизы в спорте посвятил свою работу Д. Меммерт (Memmert, 2009). Ученый отмечает необходимость проведения экспериментов с использованием тех-нологий трекинга глаз в естественной для спортсменов среде («реалистичных условиях»).…”