Anticipation and Decision Making in Sport

The ability to anticipate and make accurate decisions in a timely manner is fundamental to high-level performance in sport. This is the first book to identify the underlying science behind anticipation and decision making in sport, enhancing our scientific understanding of these phenomena and helping practitioners to develop interventions to facilitate the more rapid acquisition of the perceptual-cognitive skills that underpin these judgements.

Adopting a multidisciplinary approach ? encompassing research from psychology, biomechanics, neuroscience, physiology, computing science, and performance analysis ? the book is divided into three sections. The first section provides a comprehensive analysis of the processes and mechanisms underpinning anticipation and skilled perception in sport. In the second section, the focus shifts towards exploring the science of decision making in sport. The final section is more applied, outlining how the key skills that impact on anticipation and decision making may be facilitated through various training interventions.

With chapters written by leading experts from a vast range of countries and continents, no other book offers such a synthesis of the historical development of the field, contemporary research, and future areas for investigation in anticipation and decision making in sport. This is a fascinating and important text for students and researchers in sport psychology, skill acquisition, expert performance, motor learning, motor behaviour, and coaching science, as well as practicing coaches from any sport.

Part I: Characteristics of expert anticipation in sport

1. Postural cues, biological motion perception, and anticipation in sport

2. Familiarity detection and pattern perception

3. Contextual information and its role in expert anticipation

4. Visual search behaviours in expert perceptual judgments

5. The role of peripheral vision in sports and everyday life

6. Deception in sport

7. Emotion and its impact on perception

8. Neurophysiological studies of action anticipation in sport

9. Motor simulation in action prediction: sport-specific considerations

10. Perception-action for the study of anticipation and decision making

Part II: Characteristics of expert decision making in sport

11. Tactical creativity and decision making in sport

12. Heuristics, biases, and decision making

13. High-stakes decision making: anxiety and cognition

14. Decision making in match officials and judges

Part III: Training anticipation and decision making in sport

15. Practice and sports activities in the acquisition of anticipation and decision making

16. Training perceptual-cognitive expertise: how should practice be structured?

17. Instructional approaches for developing anticipation and decision making in sport

18. Integrating performance analysis and perceptual-cognitive training

19. Virtual environments and their role in developing perceptual-cognitive skills in sports

20. Training under pressure: current perspectives and future directions

21. Transfer of expert visual-perceptual-motor skill in sport

A. Mark Williams is Chair of Health, Kinesiology, and Recreation at the University of Utah, USA. His research interests focus on the neural and psychological mechanisms underpinning the acquisition and development of expertise, with a particular focus on anticipation and decision making. He has published more than 200 journal articles in peer-reviewed outlets and written more than 80 book chapters. He has co-authored and edited 15 books and delivered more than 200 keynote and invited lectures in over 30 countries. He is a Fellow of the European College of Sports Science, the British Association of Sport and Exercise Science, the National Academy of Kinesiology, and the British Psychological Society. He is Editor-in-Chief of several academic journals.

Robin C. Jackson is Senior Lecturer in Sport Psychology at Loughborough University, UK. His research on perceptual-cognitive expertise focusses on attentional processes in sports performance, notably in regard to anticipation and the perception of deceptive intent. He is also interested in the implications of this research for designing training protocols to develop skills that are robust under pressure. He has more than 50 peer-reviewed papers and book chapters. He is a founding member of the British Psychological Society’s Division of Sport and Exercise Psychology, and the Expertise and Skill Acquisition Network special interest group. He serves on the editorial board for several sport psychology journals and is Executive Editor of the Journal of Sports Sciences (Social and Behavioural Sciences).