Visual Attention in Sports: Enhancing Focus and Performance

VISUAL ATTENTION IN SPORTS sport athletes nonathletes. and Introduction   Training Visual Attention in Sports  Utilizing the attention window task to develop training methods.  Establishing rules/principles to enhance an athlete's focus of attention (narrowed and broadened).  Consciously perceiving game elements across a large spatial area expands tactical solutions.  Caution against excessive instructions to prevent negative impacts on decision-making and flexibility.  Personal Characteristics/Developments   Age: Younger individuals typically possess a larger attention window compared to older counterparts. Sport Expertise: Team sport athletes exhibit a broader attention window compared to individual Gaze Behavior: The attention window expands when foveal gaze is directed between two peripheral stimuli, as opposed to fixating on one stimulus while perceiving the other in the far periphery. Internal/External Focus of Attention  Factors Influencing the Breadth of Visual Attention  Tasks Distinguishing between Internal and External Focus of Attention (Wulf and Prinz, 2001).  Internal Focus: Attention directed towards the movement itself (e.g., nodal points in golf swing).  External Focus: Attention directed towards the effects of the movement (e.g., the ball or hole in golf).  Generally, External Focus is superior across different movement skills, skill levels, and target groups (Gray, 2011; Wulf et al., 2001; Wulf, 2007).  External focus enhances acquisition and learning performance (Wulf et al., 2002), particularly for expert athletes.  Experts may be hindered by an internal focus, especially for highly automated motor skills (Beilock et al., 2002). Sustained Attention   Sustained Attention maintains focus on relevant information, stimuli, or locations for an extended duration (Coull, 1998). Concentration vs. Vigilance  Concentration pertains to shorter timeframes (seconds to minutes), e.g., tracking a soccer ball during a 60-meter pass.  Vigilance refers to longerlasting attention processes (minutes to hours).  Experts exhibit different attentional patterns, focusing less on expected and predictable stimuli and more on unlikely events (Memmert, 2009).  Concentration is a temporal process, unlike spatially-oriented attention.  Limited empirical evidence on concentration in sports (Memmert, 2014a, 2014b).  Moran (1996, 2003, 2004) suggests methods for athletes to improve concentration. Cognitive Differences Experts and Novices Between  Experts excel in sport-specific perceptual and attentional performance but not in non-sportspecific cognitive abilities.  General laboratory-based perception tests do not reveal differences.  Experts notice unexpected objects more frequently in sportspecific situations but not in nonspecific situations (Memmert, 2006; Memmert et al., 2009).