New methodologies to explain and improve the expert anticipatory advantage in sports decision making

Athletes are extraordinary: They consistently perform at a level that makes most of us seem like clumsy children. It is tempting to surmise that elite athletic performance is all about training the body, but it is the brain that controls our actions. In this research, we hope to get inside the mind of an elite athlete and understand the neural processes that support their amazing skills.

Our primary interest is in how experts are able to quickly make sense of sporting scenarios as they unfold. To take one example, a cricket batsman must select a shot based on the trajectory of a ball which may travel at up to 160 km per hour. The ball can "swing" through the air, and take an additional deviation when it bounces off the pitch before reaching the batsman. There simply isn't enough time for the batsman to interpret the ball's trajectory and react accordingly. For this reason, advanced cricketers use information from prior to the moment at which the bowler releases the ball to start preparing their shot. Specifically, they seem to make use of the motion of the bowling arm, in relation to the bowling hand, primarily between the time of front foot impact and ball release. They are therefore anticipating a sporting outcome based on the way their opponents are moving their bodies.

How do we know all of this? Previous research has tested batsmen of different levels of expertise by showing them videos of onrushing bowlers and carefully removing some sections of the video, to trick the batsmen into making the wrong response. The logic goes that if a batsman can no longer get it right when a piece of information is taken away, they must have been using that piece of information when they were performing well. What we don't yet know is exactly how their brains are weighting the different pieces of information, and also how we can help young batsmen learn these anticipatory skills quickly and to an elite level.

In this research, we will introduce a sophisticated technique to subtly degrade the visual information on which expert anticipation depends. This technique, known as classification image analysis, allows us to precisely measure the information that is being used, but also to estimate the information that could be used but which an athlete is currently failing to make use of. We will then test bespoke training schemes which prompt athletes to make use of the untapped information. Finally, we will investigate whether targeted electrical brain stimulation during training can actually help them learn better. This research should help UK coaches help our athletes reach their full potential. This is important, because our athletes make a significant contribution to the culture and wellbeing of our society. Furthermore, in the longer term we believe that the training approaches we develop here may be applied to a range of other fields, for example to help maintain driving skills in our increasingly ageing population, and thus be of benefit to us all.

Year on year, competitive athletes confound our expectations regarding the limits of human performance. Here, we focus on the perceptual-motor decision making capacities of elite athletes, specifically the expert anticipatory advantage (EAA) that allows them to predict what their opponents will do in order to generate timely responses. One of our key goals is to provide a more complete account of the EAA, and in particular how it might be enhanced.

Our proposal identifies key methodological limitations in previous work characterising the information underlying the EAA. Many valuable insights have been generated by occluding sections of first-person video stimuli to see how performance suffers. However, these methods have depended upon the experimenters' judgements regarding which sources of information might be important, and have often assessed discrimination in a manner that is divorced from the motor realities of competitive sport. We instead introduce spatiotemporal classification-image analysis techniques that use random noise to degrade stimuli and reveal key sources of information, alongside a realistic motor response system. This approach allows us to not only identify, but also attribute weight to multiple independent sources of information. Furthermore, we will develop and test new training regimens to help coaches teach the EAA. This will be achieved by using ideal observer models to identify the information that is being overlooked, allowing us to implicitly redirect attention towards it. Finally, building on several recent reports, we will test whether neurostimulation can enhance learning outcomes.

While we believe that our case for support addresses questions of broad-ranging scientific interest, this application was specifically invited following a letter of intent submitted for the BBSRC highlight call "High Performance Sport as a model for the acquisition, retention and retraining of an individual's skill base." This highlight was prepared by the BBSRC in consultation with UK Sport, the organisation responsible for UK investment in high-performance sport, and as such they (or rather the coaches and athletes they work with) represent a key beneficiary. Of course they are a beneficiary that also passes on benefits to the wider UK population: There can be no doubt that sportspeople make a significant cultural contribution to the UK. Furthermore, when our athletes are successful, they raise the stock of the UK brand across the world, and contribute to our feelings of wellbeing at home (with the feel-good factor also having positive effects for our economic behaviour).

In this proposal, we have attempted to strike a balance between the "how it works" questions that are of fundamental interest to scientists, and the translational work that is required to move from 1) characterising a process (in this case the expert anticipatory advantage in sports decision making), to 2) applying the principles garnered from pure research to provide real world solutions (in this case the most efficient means for training the expert anticipatory advantage). This implies a range of timescales over which impacts will be realised. For example, we will firstly develop new methodologies which will help identify the sources of visual information that athletes are using. Here, our findings will have implications for sports coaching (specifically regarding a more complete understanding of how top athletes are performing so well) but additional applied work would be required to demonstrate that this knowledge can be translated to real-world training programmes for up-and-coming athletes. However, in a second strand we will also test interventions which should direct the athletes' attention towards under-utilised sources of visual information so that they can progress further, faster. In this case our findings will support training interventions that can be adapted for regular use very rapidly. The most immediate beneficiaries will be coaches and athletes from the sports with which we are engaging (tennis and cricket) but our methods can be adapted in a quite straightforward manner to many other sports.

Looking beyond the athletic arena (and into the longer-term future), there should also be benefits for the wider community. Issues around our growing ageing population have been identified as a research council priority for research funding. Perceptual-motor decision making is a cognitive function that underlies numerous everyday activities. One example with important implications for wider public safety is driving. It may be prone to decline in ageing, when physical limitations remove opportunities for engagement in the kinds of tasks that maintain perceptual-motor functions, yet these can presumably be preserved via computer-game-style interventions. Developing new ways to assess, train and maintain perceptual skills should contribute significantly to preserving cognitive function and promoting mental wellbeing in later life (although these benefits will obviously require additional research beyond that directly envisaged here).

As a final aside, the project should also contribute to the employability of the investigators (particularly the researcher-co-I), opening up interesting opportunities for consultancy and development work with sports professionals (i.e. commercialising the training regimens we develop). The investigators should therefore also be viewed as potential beneficiaries.