thoughts, feelings and focus of attention in real-life situations. For example, in a variation
of this procedure, McPherson (2000) asked expert and novice tennis players questions
such as “What were you thinking about while playing that point?” and “What are you
thinking about now?” during the period between points in competitive tennis matches.
Unfortunately, despite its ingenuity, certain flaws in this method are apparent. For
example, there are obvious practical and ethical constraints surrounding athletes’
willingness to be “thought sampled” during competitive situations. In addition, little or no
data have been gathered to evaluate the reliability of this procedure.
Pattern recall and recognition tasksPattern recall recognition tasks are based largely on the classic studies of de Groot (1965)
and Chase and Simon (1973) on chess experts’ memories for briefly presented chess
patterns. When these tasks are adapted for use in sport situations, athletes and/or coaches
are tested on their ability to remember precise details of rapidly presented, game-relevant
information such as the exact positions of players depicted briefly in a filmed sport
sequence. In the Chase and Simon (1973) study, expert and novice chess players were
asked to study chessboards with pieces on them for 5 seconds. Then, they had to
reconstruct the positions of these pieces on another board. As I indicated previously,
results showed that the chess masters were superior to the novices in recalling the
pieces—but only if these pieces came from structured game situations. No differences
between the groups were evident when the pieces were randomly presented initially. In a
typical sport psychological modification of this paradigm, participants may be shown a
slide or a video sequence of action from a game-specific situation for a brief duration.
Then, they are asked to recall as accurately as possible the relative position of each player
in the slide or sequence. Interestingly, the ability to recall and recognise evolving patterns
of play seems to be an excellent predictor of athletes’ anticipatory skills in team sports
(A.M.Williams, 2002b).
As a practical illustration of this pattern recall paradigm applied to the sport of rugby,
consider the configurations of players displayed in Figure 6.2a and Figure 6.2b. In both
cases, the aim of the diagrams is to depict a “three-man defence” tactical strategy. But
only one of these patterns is meaningful. Can you identify which of them makes sense
and which of them is random or meaningless? Take a moment to examine the diagrams
carefully.
If you are not knowledgeable about rugby, you should find this task very difficult, if
not impossible! But if you were an expert rugby coach, you would quickly realise that
Figure 6.2b is the meaningless pattern. To explain, Figure 6.2a portrays an orthodox
three-man defence in which the number 10 player covers the opposing number 10, the
number 12 takes the opposing number 12, the number 13 covers the opposing number 13
with the winger taking the last person. By contrast, in Figure 6.2b there is no obvious
pattern to the defensive alignment. In fact, the only defensive player who is in the correct
position is the number 10.
Extrapolating from Chase and Simon’s (1973) study, we would expect that expert
rugby players or coaches would be able to memorise the pattern of players depicted in the
orthodox three-man defence (Figure 6.2a) much better than the meaningless pattern
depicted in Figure 6.2b.
What lies beneath the surface? Investigating expertise in sport 163