The influence of basketball players’ tracking speed ability on sports decision performance

TL;DR

Expert basketball players outperform novices in tracking and decision-making, especially at moderate speeds, revealing insights into sports cognition.

Contribution

Demonstrates how tracking speed influences decision accuracy in basketball, extending dynamic sport cognition theory.

Findings

Expert players showed higher tracking accuracy than novices at 10°/s but not at 5°/s or 15°/s.

Experts had higher decision accuracy than novices across all speed conditions.

Shooting decisions were less accurate than passing and breakthrough decisions at high speeds.

Abstract

The running speed of basketball players plays a critical role in shaping the complexity and dynamics of game situations. This study aims to examine the relationship between players’ tracking speed capabilities and the quality of their decision-making during gameplay.

Employing an expert-novice paradigm, Experiment 1 assessed tracking accuracy in a multiple object tracking (MOT) task at three angular velocities: 5°/s, 10°/s, and 15°/s. Experiment 2 evaluated decision-making accuracy under three distinct running speed conditions: low speed (0.67–3.98 m/s), medium speed (3.99–7.97 m/s), and high speed (7.98–12.62 m/s).

In Experiment 1, expert players demonstrated significantly higher tracking accuracy (60.42 ± 13.98%) than novice players (41.25 ± 13.93%) at 10°/s (P < 0.001). No significant group differences were found at 5°/s or 15°/s (Ps > 0.05). In Experiment 2, the expert group exhibited significantly higher decision accuracy than the novice group across all three speed conditions (Ps < 0.001). Moreover, at high speeds (7.98–12.62 m/s), shooting decisions were significantly less accurate than passing and breakthrough decisions (Ps < 0.001), while no significant differences were observed between passing and breakthrough decisions (Ps > 0.05).

This study shows that expert basketball players display superior visual attention and decision-making in moderate-to-high complexity settings, extending dynamic sport cognition theory. The absence of differences at 5°/s and 15°/s suggests task boundary effects. Future work should examine player position and gender to refine perceptual-cognitive training and theoretical models.

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