The Influence Of Visual Field And Visual Cues On Visual Search Of Basketball Players: An Eye Movement Study

In sports, especially rapidly ball games, athletes tend to face a lot ofinformation in the early phase of sports, they have to respond in a very short period oftime,and predict opponent’s action in advance, so the selective attention for only themost relevant source of information is the foundation of successful performance. Andselective attention need to visual ability, visual search ability, ability of advance cueusage, etc. The aim of this research is to compare cognitive processing betweenexperienced athletes and amateur athletes, through investigating how the visual fieldand cues influence visual search in different perceptual and cognitive task.The sample (N=39) is composed of20experienced athletes and19amateurathletes.The procedure used visual search paradigm. The independent variables arethe level of athletes, the amplitude of the visual field and the presentation of cues.The dependent variables are the eye movement date and the reaction time of stimulus.Two experiments were conducted using eye movement technique.The pictures used inboth experiments were consisted of8shapes.In experiment1,observer participantshad to locate the matching shape by using all the number pad on the side of thekeyboard whether there was a cue or not. In experiment2, adopted similar treatmentsas Experiment1, but differed in complexity of visual search situations, observerparticipants had to judge the specific shape after search the matching shape.Our datesshow:1. the experienced atheletes get both fewer errors in the attentional task and ashorter visual reaction time than novice athletes (p <.05). The results show group ofprofessionals manifests stronger ability process information than the novice athletes.2.the cues had a greater effect in peripheral visual field than it was in centra visualfield.And experienced athletes made more efficient use of cues during bothexperiments(p <.05).3.as cognitive task difficulty increases, the subjects of eye movement indicatorsalso have obvious change, the difference between the experienced athelete and noviceathletes is reflected in a lower level of cognitive tasks.