Court vision: An attentional advantage of competitive athletes

Abstract

University athletes spend a considerable amount of time immersed in their sport environment which offers an attentional advantage over non-athletes in a sports environment. To test this, university basketball and soccer players, and non-athletes were shown photographs of basketball, soccer, and non-sports contexts using a change detection paradigm. Across repeated presentations of a photograph, participants were tasked with detecting which object was changing. It was hypothesized that athletes would be more efficient at detecting changes to sports contexts than non-athletes. Further, it was predicted that basketball players would produce the most efficient performance for basketball images and soccer players would produce the most efficient performance for soccer images (i.e., a sport-specific attentional advantage). In a second part of the experiment, the same images were presented inverted. It was predicted that inverting the images would disrupt any expertise related attentional advantage. Contrary to the predictions, basketball players were slowest to detect changes to basketball images but made the fewest errors for these images. The speed difference was eliminated when the images were inverted, but the basketball players continued to show an accuracy advantage across image type.