Individual differences in the visual control of intercepting a penalty kick in association football

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Abstract

Recent perceptual-motor studies have revealed variations in learning trajectories of novices. Despite such observation, relatively little attention has been paid to studying individual differences in experienced performers’ perceptual-motor behaviors. The present study examined individual differences for a visual anticipation task. Experienced association football goalkeepers attempted to intercept penalty kicks taken with deceptive and non-deceptive kicking actions. Data revealed that differences in the action capabilities of goalkeepers affected the timing and accuracy of movement response behaviors. Faster goalkeepers tended to wait until later before initiating movement in comparison with slower goalkeepers. The study of affordances in sport environments offers a theoretical framework with which to overcome some of the reported methodological limitations in the visual anticipation literature.

Introduction

Research has demonstrated that human behaviors such as stair climbing (Warren, 1984), sitting (Mark, 1987), and catching fly balls (Oudejans, Michaels, Bakker, & Dolné, 1996) are predicated on the accurate visual perception of affordances (i.e., opportunities for action: Gibson, 1979) for a given set of environmental conditions. The perception of an affordance entails the perception of what a set of ecological constraints offers an actor relative to his/her bodily dimensions or action capabilities (Fajen, 2005a, Fajen, 2005b, Gibson, 1979, Michaels, 2003, Stoffregen, 2000, Stoffregen, 2003). Such animal–environment relations are measured using an intrinsic metric involving a dimensionless pi-number, which expresses the ratio of a component of an animal’s action system against a reciprocal environmental property (see Warren, 1984). For example, research revealed how a critical ratio between hand size and object, that remained invariant across child development, defined the transition between grasping with one and two hands in a prehension task (van der Kamp, Savelsbergh, & Davis, 1998). Furthermore, it has recently been demonstrated that actors are also capable of visually perceiving affordances offered by the environment for another person’s actions (Ramenzoni et al., 2008, Stoffregen et al., 1999).

It has been argued that much of the affordance research has analogues in sport environments (Fajen, Riley, & Turvey, 2009). For example, Pijpers, Oudejans, and Bakker (2007) recently reported a functional relationship between participants’ perceived opportunities for action and their actual action capabilities in a wall climbing task. Pepping and Li (2005) demonstrated that actors are capable of perceiving their action capabilities for reaching an overhead ball, a requisite skill for interceptive actions in fast-ball sports such as cricket and volleyball. Equally important to understanding the performance of interceptive actions is evidence indicating that skilled performers overcome the spatiotemporal constraints of fast-ball sports through the pickup of visual information presented within an opponent’s emergent motion (e.g., Farrow & Abernethy, 2003). In this respect, data indicate that visual anticipation for goalkeepers in the football penalty kick is predicated on differences in information pickup coupled to later initiated movement responses (Savelsbergh, van der Kamp, Williams, & Ward, 2005).

The study of Savelsbergh and colleagues (2005; see also, Savelsbergh, Williams, van der Kamp, & Ward, 2002), like much of the visual anticipation research, relied on video simulation tasks that examine perceptual judgments using simplified response measures (e.g., a button press: Cañal-Bruland & Schmidt, 2009; or simplified body movement: Jackson, Warren, & Abernethy, 2006). This approach contrasts with the complex motor actions that require complementary vision for perception and action (see van der Kamp, Rivas, van Doorn, & Savelsbergh, 2008). Simulated experimental constraints have been criticized as possible methodological limitations that confine our understanding of skilled perception and action. For example, Cañal-Bruland and Schmidt (2009) recently acknowledged that “a simple two-choice button press response…differs fundamentally from typical whole body and temporarily constrained movements that are required in the natural setting…the laboratory setting may have led to an elimination of perception–action couplings, and may have impeded the influence of the motor system” (p. 239–240). A particular concern is that simulation experiments have studied perception in isolation from requisite actions (van der Kamp et al., 2008). Furthermore, the experimental conditions of video simulation tasks fail to represent the array of stimuli available for perception and action in an athlete’s natural environment (see Brunswik, 1956, Dhami et al., 2004).

Another major concern in the perceptual expertise literature, as with many studies of perception and action (see Withagen & Chemero, 2009), is the apparent presumption that there is an optimal or universal perceptual strategy towards which all skilled participants should aspire. This assumption has been questioned by observations of within-group differences in gaze behaviors revealed between successful and less successful athletes with the same level of performance experience (e.g., Savelsbergh et al., 2005, Vaeyens et al., 2007). The tendency to average data in statistical analyses can mask observations of functional levels of performance variability across individual participants (Newell et al., 2001, Withagen and Chemero, 2009). Support for such an assertion can be reconciled by recent studies that have emphasized individual differences in perceptual learning (Jacobs et al., 2001, Withagen and van Wermeskerken, 2009), coordination acquisition (Chow et al., 2008, Liu et al., 2006) and even the achievement of feeding behaviors in mountain gorillas (Tennie, Hedwig, Call, & Tomasello, 2008).

The examination of affordances in sport environments may offer a theoretical means to address some of the concerns highlighted above: particularly the issue of interdependence of perception and action and the examination of individual differences in the visual regulation of action. For example, if the actualization of an affordance is action-scaled in goalkeeping performance of the penalty kick, then differences in an individual’s action capabilities (e.g., agility) should affect the timing of movement initiation. That is, a faster goalkeeper will be able to initiate movement closer to the moment of penalty taker foot-ball contact in comparison with a slower goalkeeper. This idea is captured within Fajen’s (e.g., Fajen, 2005b) model of affordance-based control. He proposed that the visual control of successful action is predicated on an actor’s sensitivity to their own action capabilities. For example, during visually regulated braking, the necessary deceleration required to stop must not exceed the maximum possible deceleration (Fajen, 2005a). Thus, one’s own action capabilities place a critical action boundary that limits successful performance (Fajen, 2005b). The implication is that there may be a bias in the timing of an actor’s actions that ensures that they remain within a “safe” region that separates achievable from impossible actions (Fajen & Devaney, 2006). The action capabilities of a performer that allow a particular action for a given set of environmental conditions have been termed by some ecological psychologists as effectivities (e.g., see Turvey, 1992). However, the exact role of effectivities within the theory of affordances is a source of continued discussion (for recent examples, see Michaels, 2003, Pijpers et al., 2007, Stoffregen, 2003). Therefore, with such debate in mind, the term action capability is used in the present article following Fajen’s (2005b) model of affordance-based control.

If individual differences in action capabilities do indeed affect the timing and accuracy of response behaviors, then there would be imperative implications for understanding vision for perception and action during fast-ball sports. For example, experimental conditions that force participants to rely on advance information alone (e.g., movements of an opponent rather than additional ball-flight information) have been shown to result in a decrease in the accuracy of skilled athletes’ perceptual judgments (Farrow & Abernethy, 2003) and increase their vulnerability to deception (Rowe, Horswill, Kronvall-Parkinson, Poulter, & McKenna, 2009). Following Fajen’s (2005b) model of affordance-based control, if a goalkeeper’s timing of movement initiation against a penalty kick is constrained by their action capabilities, it is plausible that slower goalkeepers may be forced to couple their movements to earlier penalty taker kinematic information compared to faster goalkeepers. Such action boundaries may predispose slower goalkeepers to lower levels of performance accuracy while also increasing their susceptibility to deception.

In the present study, we investigated a group of experienced goalkeepers to assess whether individual differences in action capabilities affected the timing of response behaviors when facing deceptive and non-deceptive penalty kicks. We tested the specific hypothesis that skilled goalkeepers scale the timing of their movement initiation when facing penalty kicks to their own action capabilities. If so, goalkeepers must perceive the penalty task in terms of the time it requires them to reach the anticipated location of the ball as it is kicked towards the goal.

Section snippets

Participants

Seven experienced association football goalkeepers (M age = 23.4 years, SD = 4.2) with 11.7 (SD = 4.7) years of competitive association football experience as goalkeepers were recruited as participants. One penalty taker was recruited to execute all kicks. The player was matched to the goalkeepers by performance standard and length of experience. Prior to testing and contacting participants, ethical clearance was obtained from the local University ethics committee. All players provided written consent

Baseline movement times

Table 1 shows the individual goalkeeper mean BMTs for each target location. A mixed ANOVA revealed a significant main effect of location, F(5, 105) = 19.34, p < .0001, η2 = .48, goalkeeper, F(6, 21) = 17.37, p < .0001, η2 = .96, and a location by goalkeeper interaction F(30, 105) = 3.827, p < .0001, η2 = .52. Bonferroni-corrected post hoc comparisons with an adjusted alpha-level of .001 revealed that participant 3 (M = 750 ms, SE = 74) had the shortest BMT which was less than all other goalkeepers. Participant 4 (M = 820 

Discussion

Data revealed that individual differences in action capabilities of skilled goalkeepers affected the timing of movement responses when facing the penalty kick in association football. Results indicated a correlation between goalkeeper BMT and PKMT, implying that the faster the goalkeeper (small BMT) the later the goal-keeping action was initiated (small PKMT). Importantly, the between-participant variation in PKMT (Fig. 1) indicated individual differences in the information-movement couplings

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