Reduced attentional focus and the influence on expert anticipatory perception

The anticipatory memory encodings of expert and novice basketball players were examined under conditions of both full (attended condition) and reduced (unattended condition) attention (see also Gorman, Abernethy, & Farrow in Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 75, 835-844, 2013a). Participants completed a typical pattern recall task using dynamic playing sequences from basketball, and their responses were compared to both the original target pattern as well as to the series of patterns that occurred immediately after and immediately before the target image. The latter had not previously been employed in a pattern recall task when examining the anticipatory encoding of pattern information. Results revealed that the overall extent of the forward displacement for both the attended and unattended patterns was generally significantly greater for the experts, with the expert advantage tending to be most prominent for the attacking patterns. The novel addition of both forward and backward scenes may provide a more precise measure of the anticipatory effect, suggesting that future research in this domain should use a similar methodological design.