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The ability to anticipate the actions of opponents is a significant marker of expertise in many sports. The role of non-kinematic contextual information in anticipation has received increasing attention over the last decade. In this article, we review contemporary research focusing on the specific impact of contextual information related to opponents’ action tendencies on anticipation in sport. This information can be acquired explicitly when probabilistic information about the preferences of the opponent is provided to the athlete before the action commences, or the athlete can pick up this information through exposure to the actions of the opponent. Regardless of how this information is acquired, it has been shown to influence anticipation performance and underlying processing priorities on a wide range of sport tasks. However, factors such as sport-specific expertise, informational reliability, task load, and judgment utility moderate these effects. We discuss methodological issues and gaps in existing knowledge and provide guidance for how to develop more representative research designs in future. Finally, we highlight practical implications that may help coaches and performance analysts in predicting the effectiveness of priming athletes with information about the action tendencies of opponents in various performance situations. © 2023

Expert performance across a range of domains is underpinned by superior perceptual-cognitive skills. Over the last five decades, researchers have provided evidence that experts can identify and interpret opponent kinematics more effectively than their less experienced counterparts. More recently, researchers have demonstrated that experts also use non-kinematic information, in this paper termed contextual priors, to inform their predictive judgments. While the body of literature in this area continues to grow exponentially, researchers have yet to develop an overarching theoretical framework that can predict and explain anticipatory behaviour and provide empirically testable hypotheses to guide future work. In this paper, we propose that researchers interested in anticipation in sport could adopt a Bayesian model for probabilistic inference as an overarching framework. We argue that athletes employ Bayesian reliability-based strategies in order to integrate contextual priors with evolving kinematic information during anticipation. We offer an insight into Bayesian theory and demonstrate how contemporary literature in sport psychology fits within this framework. We hope that the paper encourages researchers to engage with the Bayesian literature in order to provide greater insight into expert athletes’ assimilation of various sources of information when anticipating the actions of others in complex and dynamic environments. © 2020 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Introduction: We examined skilled-based differences in the impact of exposure to an opponent with action tendencies that were either independent of, dependent on, or both independent of and dependent on evolving environmental information during anticipation. Methods: A video-based two-vs.-two soccer task was employed, where 14 expert and 14 novice soccer players had to predict an attacking opponent's imminent actions, before and after exposure to the preceding actions of the opponent. Results: Anticipation accuracy, number of responses congruent with the opponent's action tendencies, response confidence, and visual dwell time on the opponent in possession increased following opponent exposure, both in experts and novices. When compared to novices, experts demonstrated higher anticipation accuracy, more congruent responses, and greater response confidence. Novices performed at their best when the opponent exhibited action tendencies that were independent of the environment, whereas experts demonstrated their highest performance when the opponent had action tendencies that were both independent of and dependent on unfolding environmental information. Discussion: Our findings provide novel insights into the role of context-environment dependency and support the notion that experts are superior to novices in detecting and utilizing opponents' action tendencies and integrating this information with unfolding environmental information during anticipation. Copyright © 2023 Gredin, Thomas, Broadbent, Fawver and Williams.

There is limited knowledge about the impact of task load on experts’ integration of contextual priors and visual information during dynamic and rapidly evolving anticipation tasks. We examined how experts integrate contextual priors––specifically, prior information regarding an opponent's action tendencies––with visual information such as movement kinematics, during a soccer-specific anticipation task. Furthermore, we combined psychophysiological measures and retrospective self-reports to gain insight into the cognitive load associated with this integration. Players were required to predict the action of an oncoming opponent, with and without the explicit provision of contextual priors, under two different task loads. In addition to anticipation performance, we compared continuous electroencephalography (EEG) and self-reports of cognitive load across conditions. Our data provide tentative evidence that increased task load may impair performance by disrupting the integration of contextual priors and visual information. EEG data suggest that cognitive load may increase when contextual priors are explicitly provided, whereas self-report data suggested a decrease in cognitive load. The findings provide insight into the processing demands associated with integration of contextual priors and visual information during dynamic anticipation tasks, and have implications for the utility of priors under cognitively demanding conditions. Furthermore, our findings add to the existing literature, suggesting that continuous EEG may be a more valid measure than retrospective self-reports for in-task assessment of cognitive load. © 2020 The Authors. Psychophysiology published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of Society for Psychophysiological Research

Objectives: We examined the impact of judgement utility on the use of explicit contextual priors and visual information during action anticipation in soccer. Design: We employed a repeated measures design, in which expert soccer players had to perform a video-based anticipation task under various conditions. Methods: The task required the players to predict the direction (left or right) of an oncoming opponent’s imminent actions. Performance and verbal reports of thoughts from players were compared across three conditions. In two of the conditions, contextual priors pertaining to the opponent’s action tendencies (dribble = 70%; pass = 30%) were explicitly provided. In one of these experimental conditions, players were told that an incorrect ‘right’ response would result in conceding a goal, which created imbalanced judgement utility (left = high utility; right = low utility). In the third control condition, no explicit contextual priors or additional instructions were provided. Results: The explicit provision of contextual priors changed players’ processing priorities, biased their anticipatory judgements in accordance with the opponent’s action tendencies, and enhanced anticipation performance. These effects were suppressed under conditions in which the explicit contextual priors were accompanied by imbalanced judgement utility. Under these conditions, the players were more concerned about the consequences of their judgements and were more inclined to opt for the direction with the higher utility. Conclusions: It appears that judgement utility disrupts the integration of contextual priors and visual information, which results in decreased impact of explicit contextual priors during action anticipation. © 2019 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.

It is proposed that experts are able to integrate prior contextual knowledge with emergent visual information to make complex predictive judgments about the world around them, often under heightened levels of uncertainty and extreme time constraints. However, limited knowledge exists about the impact of anxiety on the use of such contextual priors when forming our decisions. We provide a novel insight into the combined impact of contextual priors and anxiety on anticipation in soccer. Altogether, 12 expert soccer players were required to predict the actions of an oncoming opponent while viewing life-sized video simulations of 2-versus-2 defensive scenarios. Performance effectiveness and processing efficiency were measured under four conditions: no contextual priors (CP) about the action tendencies of the opponent and low anxiety (LA); no CP and high anxiety (HA); CP and LA; CP and HA. The provision of contextual priors did not affect processing efficiency, but it improved performance effectiveness on congruent trials. Anxiety negatively affected processing efficiency, but this did not affect the use of contextual priors or influence performance effectiveness. It appears that anxiety and prior contextual information impact attentional resources independent of each other. Findings are discussed with reference to current models of anticipation and anxiety. © 2018, © 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

The understanding of how experts integrate prior situation-specific information (i.e., contextual priors) with emergent visual information when performing dynamic and temporally constrained tasks is limited. We used a soccer-based anticipation task to examine the ability of expert and novice players to integrate prior information about an opponent's action tendencies with unfolding environmental information such as opponent kinematics. We recorded gaze behaviors and ongoing expectations during task performance. Moreover, we assessed their final anticipatory judgments and perceived levels of cognitive effort invested. Explicit contextual priors biased the allocation of visual attention and shaped ongoing expectations in experts but not in novices. When the final action was congruent with the most likely action given the opponent's action tendencies, the contextual priors enhanced the final judgments for both groups. For incongruent trials, the explicit priors had a negative impact on the final judgments of novices but not experts. We interpreted the data using a Bayesian framework to provide novel insights into how contextual priors and dynamic environmental information are combined when making decisions under time pressure. Moreover, we provide evidence that this integration is governed by the temporal relevance of the information at hand as well as the ability to infer this relevance. © 2018 American Psychological Association.