SITUATION AWARENESS IN SPORTS SCIENCE: BEYOND THE COGNITIVE PARADIGM

In sports, is increasingly spread awareness that cognitive-perceptual abilities, such as anticipation, decision-making, and awareness of the situation, are prerequisites for excellent performance. Experienced athletes develop, as a result of a long practice, sophisticated task-specific knowledge structures that enable them to deal with situations more effectively and efficiently than others. Elite athletes, for example, selectively perform a visual scan of the scene, focusing the inattention on relevant sources and discarding irrelevant information at the same time. Additionally, experienced athletes are more aware of events that can be probabilistically occurring in a given situation and are able to capture contextual signals that can facilitate predicting future events. These skills act in complementarily with a vast repertoire of strategies and tactics available and with the knowledge of their rapid spendiness in a given situation.