The impact of self-generated and explicitly acquired contextual knowledge on anticipatory performance

ABSTRACT

The present study aimed to investigate the impact of self-generated and explicitly acquired contextual knowledge of teammates’ defensive qualities on anticipatory performance in a complex sensorimotor task. Twelve expert and twelve near-expert handball players were examined in a domain-specific defence task presented in an immersive virtual-reality environment. In two-thirds of the trials, 1:1 situations (i.e., teammate versus opponent) were presented in which the teammates next to the participant played a specific role. Whilst the weak teammate lost every situation, which required the participant to block a throw, the strong teammate won every situation, which required the participant to stay in his position. Since explicit knowledge of this pattern was only provided in a later phase of the experiment, participants would have to generate the respective knowledge themselves beforehand. To this end, the following variables were analysed: the detection of experimentally induced patterns, the correctness of the participants’ motor responses and their positioning as a function of the respective teammate’s defensive quality. Main results showed that experts are better able to utilize both self-generated as well as explicitly acquired knowledge regarding teammates’ defensive qualities, whereas near-experts’ performance was enhanced only by explicitly provided contextual knowledge.

KEYWORDS:

• Perceptual-cognitive skills
• decision-making
• expertise
• virtual reality
• motion capture
• team sports

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Ralf Kredel for his indispensable technological support, Nicole Kaufmann for her assistance in the data collection and André Klostermann as well as Catherine Haber for valuable comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

Disclosure statement

The authors report no conflict of interest.