Visual search strategies and decision-making in sport.

Abstract

Describes a series of experiments conducted on the racquet sports of badminton and squash to determine the location of the advance cues that provide critical anticipatory information and to document any expert–novice differences in anticipatory cue usage. Data suggest movement of the arm and racquet and outward flight of the struck ball (or shuttle) as the source of the critical cues for racquet sports, and a close match was found between the visual search sequence and the proximal-to-distal kinematic development of the opponent's stroke. Expert racquet sport players differed from novices in terms of their ability to use the earlier occurring, more proximal arm cues as a basis for predicting resultant stroke speed and direction, but these differences in information pick-up were not matched by differences in visual search strategy.