But I can’t pass that far! The influence of motor skill on decision making

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Abstract

Objectives

The influence of motor skill on perceptual-cognitive and perceptual-motor decision making has been theorised but not verified empirically.

Method

Expert (n = 19), developmental (n = 20), and lesser-skilled netballers (n = 19) completed tests designed to evaluate three different components of domain-specific expertise: (i) motor skill-execution; (ii) perceptual-cognitive decision making; and (iii) perceptual-motor decision making.

Results

Each of the three measures was found to improve commensurate with domain-specific skill. Decisions requiring movements (perceptual-motor) elicited more accurate decision making than simple verbal responses (perceptual-cognitive), irrespective of participant skill. Although motor skill was found to be related to the successful execution of a most appropriate movement in a game situation, it was not found to limit the nature of the decision made by participants. No evidence was found to support the supposition that lesser-skilled participants bias their perceptual-cognitive decisions towards ones supported by their motor ability.

Conclusions

Results fail to comprehensively support the contemporary models for the development of perceptual-cognitive and perceptual-motor skill in sport.

Highlights

► Motor skill influenced the performance of the required action, but not necessarily the decision made. ► Performance is superior on a coupled perceptual-motor task relative to a de-coupled perceptual-cognitive task. ► Motor skill performance was commensurate with expertise.

Introduction

A considerable body of knowledge has developed addressing the individual perceptual-cognitive and perceptual-motor skills which differentiate expert and novice sport performers, yet relatively little work has directly examined how these skills interact during the development of context-specific skill (Starkes, Cullen, & MacMahon, 2004). Raab, Masters, and Maxwell (2005) suggested that sports performance comprises two primary components; the ‘how’ (referring to technique), and ‘what’ (referring to tactics). Young elite table tennis players were trained over two four week periods, with testing over a six month period revealing that those who trained both the ‘how’ and ‘what’ had greater performance increases than those who trained the ‘how’ only. An unanswered question in the literature is whether technical ability (how) affects the ability to make a decision (what). An attempt to further understand this question led Starkes et al. (2004) to propose a descriptive model for the acquisition and retention of perceptual-motor expertise, highlighting the need for a greater understanding of the interactions and changes in perceptual-cognitive and perceptual-motor behaviours as the skill is acquired. Perceptual-cognitive skill can be considered to be what one is able to perceive and understand; perceptual-motor skill refers to what one is able to perceive and do through movement (Starkes et al.). In this model, skilled performance is considered either to be enabled, or to be constrained, by one of the two streams. By way of a simple example, a basketball player may be aware that their team needs a three point shot to be taken (when they are two points down with limited time remaining in the match), however, if that player does not possess the physical skill necessary to successfully make the shot, then he/she is not able to execute the play they know is required. In this case the Starkes et al. model would suggest that the player possesses the appropriate perceptual-cognitive knowledge required of the task, but he/she is constrained by their motor skill. Conceivably the converse situation may also occur, where a player possesses the physical skill to perform the most appropriate action, yet they may not have the required perceptual-cognitive skill to know when to take the correct option at the most appropriate time (McPherson & Thomas, 1989).

Repeated exposure to a stimulus may produce stronger representations between the stimuli and associated performance. Jacoby and colleagues (Jacoby and Dallas, 1981, Jacoby and Whitehouse, 1989) have argued that when stimuli are repeatedly encountered they are processed more fluently and faster than less frequent encounters. The more a motor response is repeatedly performed following exposure to a particular stimuli, it is in a sense ‘trained’ and thus greater fluency is developed (Topolinski & Strack, 2009). It is expected that athletes who have trained both the how and what, or both their perceptual-cognitive and perceptual-motor skills will have greater motor fluency, and as a result respond quicker in situations requiring both a decision and movement than athletes who have experienced less training or only trained one component of performance (e.g. trained how but not what).

French et al., 1996, French et al., 1995, Nevett and French, 1997 have examined cognitive knowledge structures in sport, particularly for players of different levels of expertise in baseball. In contrast to their early work which was unable to differentiate the decisions of players with different levels of expertise (French et al., 1995), more recent studies have revealed these differences with significant expertise and age-based contrasts found for game knowledge and problem solution generation (French et al., 1996, Nevett and French, 1997). For example, when examining the perceptual-cognitive ability of younger baseballers, those who did not have the physical capability to throw from the outfield to home base did not generate this as a possible solution in a verbal response to a simulated situation; older players who were able to throw this distance successfully selected this as the most desirable option (Nevett & French, 1997). As a result, it appears that the limited physical skills of these younger players constrained their ability to make the most appropriate context-specific decision. Although motor skill was not directly assessed in these studies, the inference from the relationship between expertise and perceptual-cognitive skills has been that a player’s physical skill may influence their cognitive decision making.

An important experimental issue that has limited the degree of research directly examining the link between decision making and motor skill-execution can be explained by an understanding of the cognitive origins of research into motor expertise (Abernethy, Thomas, & Thomas, 1993). The most prevalent method of assessing perceptual-cognitive skill in team sports has been to use video-based tests of decision making ability where perception is uncoupled from an action. These essentially cognitive tasks result in an obvious reduction in ecological validity when comparing this to testing which takes place in-situ. Early attempts at in-situ testing were limited in that the participants were not part of the action but rather sat in the grandstand (Starkes & Lindley, 1994), or that the on-court players were stationary (Lindley, in Starkes & Lindley, 1994), hence the issue of perception-action coupling has still been problematic. Persistent issues related to reliability and measurement sensitivity continue to render in-situ test settings as difficult propositions. As a result many researchers have sought a compromise between de-coupled perceptual-cognitive testing and the coupled, but less controllable in-situ perceptual-motor testing, by requiring physical responses to be made while observing video-based displays often presented in near life-size dimensions (Helsen & Pauwels, 1993). These approaches have typically been successful in capturing a component of expert performance, with movement-based responses shown to result in a stronger effect of expertise when compared to verbal or cognitive responses (see Farrow and Abernethy, 2003, Mann et al., 2010; though see; Ranganathan & Carlton, 2007 for an exception). There are few studies which have directly compared laboratory-based and real-world test settings where the degree of perception-action coupling is systematically manipulated (see Abernethy et al., 2001, Farrow et al., 2005 for exceptions). The majority of these studies have comprised one-on-one response tasks, with an emphasis on anticipating the opponent’s movement or ball direction. Very few studies have been conducted in dynamic time stressed team sports with the aim of investigating decision making accuracy (Helsen and Pauwels, 1993, Helsen and Starkes, 1999).

An examination of how key skills develop across the developmental spectrum, for instance, the skills demonstrated by a talented under-age athlete through to an expert open-age athlete, provides an ideal opportunity to better understand how the perceptual-cognitive and perceptual-motor streams interact and are nurtured in conjunction with the execution of sports-specific motor skills developed with expertise. A better understanding of these relationships may provide practitioners with an improved understanding for how to design training programs which are more specific to the needs and abilities of the athletes they are working with. It has not been shown whether motor skill constrains decision making for perceptual-cognitive and perceptual-motor tasks. It seems reasonable to expect that the superior motor skills of expert performers will facilitate superior outcomes once a decision is made for movement execution in a game, yet it is not known whether a lack of skill development will constrain the actual decisions made by players. Furthermore, it is not known whether the inferior motor skills of lesser-skilled participants will limit decisions even when the ecological validity of a task is reduced to a perceptual-cognitive task requiring a verbal response to a video-based display.

The aim of this study was to determine how the development of motor skill-execution may influence both perceptual-cognitive and perceptual-motor decision making performance across a developmental spectrum. Netballers of three different levels of expertise (expert, developmental, and lesser-skilled) completed tests designed to evaluate three different components of domain-specific expertise: (i) motor skill-execution, (ii) perceptual-cognitive decision making, and (iii) perceptual-motor decision making. The test of motor skill-execution examined performance in a netball-specific passing task. The perceptual-cognitive decision making task required participants to make a verbal response to a video-based display to assess players’ knowledge and understanding of the evolving play. The perceptual-motor decision making task was designed to match the situations simulated in the perceptual-cognitive task but to measure what participants perceive and do. To this end, participants were embedded in live play in-situ, and required to select the most appropriate decision and execute the corresponding pass. It was hypothesised that first, performance on each of the three tasks would improve commensurate with expertise, providing an accurate reflection of the cognitive and motor skills concurrently acquired across the developmental spectrum. Second, it was hypothesised that the enhanced task specificity when replicating the natural setting in the perceptual-motor task would result in enhanced decision making when compared to the perceptual-cognitive task for expert and developmental athletes, but not for lesser-skilled netballers. It was expected that the increased task demands of the perceptual-motor task would act as an impediment to lesser-skilled participants, and as a result their performance would decrease. Third, similar to younger baseball players who do not select decisions outside of their motor skill capabilities (Nevett & French, 1997), it was hypothesised that while capable of executing the motor skill/s required, the types of decisions made by the developmental and lesser-skilled participants would be constrained by a lack of motor skill proficiency. More specifically, these lesser-skilled players were expected to favour responses over shorter distances as a result of their inability to consistently execute longer passes. It was expected this would manifest in players of lesser skill development demonstrating: (i) relatively more accurate decisions over closer distances; (ii) a response bias preferring to pass over shorter distances; and (iii) relatively more time spent fixating their gaze on proximal rather than distant players.

Section snippets

Participants

A total of 58 females participated in the study, recruited into three groups according to their skill level in the sport of netball. The expert group consisted of 19 netballers (mean age 24.3 ± 4.8 years) who possessed an average of 17.6 ± 4.3 years playing experience and were all members of the Australian National open-age netball squad. The developmental group consisted of 20 netballers (mean age 16.6 ± .5 years) who possessed 10.1 ± 1.6 years of playing experience and were members of the

Motor skill-execution test

For a summary of which analyses correspond to the hypotheses please see Table 1. To assess the accuracy of each passing trial, post-test analysis of the video recordings were used to evaluate the location of the ball at the time it hit the wall. Rather than use a dichotomous hit/miss scale, it was decided upon to use a scale rewarding proximity to the target (Sachlikidis & Salter, 2007). A scaled 7 × 7 square overlay grid was developed and saved as a jpeg image to measure accuracy, with the

Results

To check for parity of the scenarios from the three player positions, 3 (Skill; expert, developmental, lesser-skilled) × 3 (Playing position; attack, mid-court, defence) univariate ANOVAs were run separately for the tests of motor skill-execution and overall decision making accuracy (average of PC-decision, PM-decision and PM-execution tests). No significant differences were observed for the skill level × playing position interactions (motor skill-execution, F(4,53) = .60, p = .66, β = .20;

Discussion

This study sought to investigate the influence of motor skill on perceptual-cognitive and perceptual-motor decision making across different levels of sporting expertise. As expected, performance on the motor skill-execution test was directly related to expertise, with experts possessing greater passing accuracy than the developmental athletes, who in turn were superior to the lesser-skilled participants. Decision making performance was superior for the perceptual-motor task compared to the

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank Clare MacMahon for her input into this project. We would also like to acknowledge the Australian Institute of Sport netball program and the Australian open and 17 and under talent identification netball squad coaches and athletes for their assistance and participation in the study. Finally, thank you to Melissa Hopwood, Tara Handke and Adam Gorman for their assistance in data collection.

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