Trainability of Perception and Attention in Sports

University:
California State University, Northridge
Course:
PSY 150 | Introduction to Psychology
Academic year:

2023
Views:

386

Pages:

2
Author:

Jithin J I

TRAINABILITY OF PERCEPTION AND ATTENTION IN SPORTS (performing multiple tasks simultaneously). Introduction  Expertise in Sports     Experts excel in perceptual and attentional performances specific to their sport. Nature vs. Nurture Debate  Recognizing patterns in game situations enables experts to process and store more information simultaneously. Debate: Nature vs. Nurture  Controversial discussion: Are differences in visual attention innate or a result of learning and training?  Some argue for preexisting differences as responsible for athletic success.  Most researchers suggest that attentional abilities can be improved through experience and optimized with training.  Experts develop more efficient information processing and extensive knowledge representations, facilitating quicker object identification and decision-making. Training Perceptual Abilities in Sports   Attention window task confirms performance disparities and quantifies them. Experts outperform novices in action anticipation, allowing quicker counterreactions based on limited information. Anticipatory decisionmaking can be trained using techniques like occlusion (temporal and spatial). Visual Attention Differences Explanatory Models  Visual Attention Performance   Research identifies differences in visual attention between experts and novices using the dual-task paradigm What Came First?  Two explanatory models for experts' superior perceptual and attentional performance:   (a) Innate cognitive differences benefit performance.  (b) Cognitive abilities are developed through sport-specific training. Current research leans towards (b) as the dominant causal direction. Trainability of Cognitive Abilities  Trainability Abilities of Cognitive  If differences are preexisting, the trainability of cognitive abilities is questioned.  If differences result from training, systematic training methods should be implemented to enhance performance goals.