The impact of contextual priors and anxiety on performance effectiveness and processing efficiency in anticipation

• It is proposed that experts are able to integrate prior contextual knowledge with emergent visual information to make complex predictive judgments about the world around them, often under heightened levels of uncertainty and extreme time constraints. However, limited knowledge exists about the impact of anxiety on the use of such contextual priors when forming our decisions. We provide a novel insight into the combined impact of contextual priors and anxiety on anticipation in soccer. Altogether, 12 expert soccer players were required to predict the actions of an oncoming opponent while viewing life-sized video simulations of 2-versus-2 defensive scenarios. Performance effectiveness and processing efficiency were measured under four conditions: no contextual priors (CP) about the action tendencies of the opponent and low anxiety (LA); no CP and high anxiety (HA); CP and LA; CP and HA. The provision of contextual priors did not affect processing efficiency, but it improved performance effectiveness on congruent trials. Anxiety negatively affected processing efficiency, but this did not affect the use of contextual priors or influence performance effectiveness. It appears that anxiety and prior contextual information impact attentional resources independent of each other. Findings are discussed with reference to current models of anticipation and anxiety. © 2018, © 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Subject headings

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Psykologi (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Psychology (hsv//eng)

Keyword

Decision making

expertise

mental effort

probabilistic information

soccer

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

art (subject category)