An in-situ examination of the timing of information pick-up for interception by cricket batsmen of different skill levels

doi:10.1016/j.psychsport.2009.04.002

Psychology of Sport and Exercise

Volume 10, Issue 6, November 2009, Pages 644-652

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psychsport.2009.04.002 Get rights and content

Abstract

Objectives

Cricket batting is performed under demanding constraints, which requires rapid and accurate decision making for successful achievement of the skill goal. To understand how batsmen negotiate these constraints, the capability of highly skilled and low skilled cricket batsmen to utilise visual information prior to and during sections of ball flight to strike balls delivered by fast bowlers was examined.

Method

Six highly skilled and six low skilled batsmen faced different types of balls delivered by three fast bowlers. Batsmen wore vision occlusion spectacles and were required to strike delivered balls, while their vision of the bowler's delivery action and ball flight was selectively occluded. Three vision conditions were randomly designed that included temporal occlusion at: (i) a point prior to ball release (providing only advance information), (ii) a point prior to ball bounce (providing advance and ball flight information) and (iii) no occlusion (where all advance, ball flight and bounce information were visible). Foot movements made forward or backward were assessed as a measure of ball length judgement, while the quality of bat–ball contact was assessed as a measure of interception.

Results

Results demonstrated the superior capability of highly skilled batsmen to utilise information prior to ball release to judge short ball length. Expert batsmen were better able to utilise ball flight information prior to and post-bounce to attain a superior number of bat–ball contacts.

Conclusions

Findings demonstrate that the mechanism of experts to deal with task constraints when attempting to intercept a delivered ball is their capability to pick-up visual information to judge ball landing position.

Section snippets

Participants

Six highly skilled batsmen (three left handed and three right-handed) and six low-skilled batsmen (all right-handed) participated. The highly skilled players were recruited from the Victorian State Cricket Squad, while the low-skilled players were university students who had no playing experience above junior (under 16) level. The age range of the highly skilled and low-skilled groups were 20–26 (M = 22.16 & SD = 2.40) and 21–35 (M = 24.16 & SD = 5.67), respectively. Three right-arm fast

Consistency of experimental conditions and reliability of dependent measures

Table 1 shows the occlusion times and distribution of trial numbers relative to skill level and experimental condition. A 2 × 2 × 2 (skill level, delivery length, occlusion condition, latter including pre-release and pre-bounce occlusion conditions only) factorial ANOVA with repeated measures on the last two factors revealed no significant interaction between skill level, delivery length and occlusion condition F(1, 10) = .20, p > .05, η_p² = .02. This indicates that equal viewing time was

Discussion

In cricket batting, the batsman is required to overcome several task constraints to successfully achieve the skill goal. One constraint involves the velocity that a ball is delivered, which places time stress upon the batsmen to move their body into position and intercept the ball efficiently with the bat to score runs. The purpose of this experiment was, firstly, to examine the relative contributions of advance, ball flight and ball bounce information for gross body positioning involving the

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While skilled performers utilise information from postural cues, patterns, and context to anticipate, skilled sports people have also been reported to make use of information from early periods of ball-flight to accurately anticipate or adjust and modify their decisions. For example, in cricket, early ball-flight can be used to anticipate the nature of a delivery from spin and seam bowlers (Müller & Abernethy, 2006; Müller et al., 2009). Runswick, Roca, Williams, McRobert, and North (2018) edited video footage to present different sources of information (game context, the bowler's postural cues, and ball-flight) to cricket batters and asked them to anticipate where the next delivery would pass the stumps.
The ability to anticipate is a defining feature of skilled sports performance. To date, research investigating the information that underpins skilled anticipation has focused on kinematic information from an opponent and contextual factors. However, there has been a paucity of research investigating the influence of ball-flight and spin. Oval shaped balls, despite the seeming random nature, do in fact display specific bounce characteristics based on the nature of ball-flight. We tested the ability of 38 professional (categorised in to 15 ‘backs’ and 23 ‘forwards’ based on their playing position) and 20 less-skilled rugby union players to anticipate ball bounce direction for grubber and chip kicks using a temporal occlusion paradigm to restrict access to different sources of information. We predicted that skilled performers would have become attuned to both advance postural cues and the physical laws of ball flight and spin that govern ball bounce through their extensive practice and exposure to these situations, and so would anticipate more accurately than less-skilled performers. Results supported this hypothesis as skilled participants outperformed less-skilled in all occlusion conditions, however all groups anticipated more accurately with access to later emerging information sources (i.e., ball spin and rotation) with the skill level difference primarily underpinned by earlier available sources (i.e., advance postural cues). There was no difference between anticipation accuracy in professional forwards and backs and no kick type x group interaction, suggesting that the knowledge structures underpinning perceptual-cognitive expertise are not position specific. Findings have implication for models of anticipation and training design and tactics in rugby.
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In our approach, categories were adapted to include sources of contextual information and were linked to sources of information previously identified in the literature as contributing to anticipation and identified in a previous study using verbal reports in a cricket batting task (Runswick et al., 2018). The possible information sources included: (i) bowler's body, visual information gained from cues from the bowler's body or run up (Müller et al., 2006); (ii) sequencing, information gained from events of previous deliveries or actions (McRobert et al., 2011); (iii) game situation, information gained from the score or time left in the game (Farrow & Reid, 2012; Paull & Glencross, 1997); (iv) field positioning, information gained from the position of the opposition fielders (Loffing & Hagemann, 2014; Paull & Glencross, 1997); and (v) ball flight, visual information gained from the flight of the ball (Abernethy, 1990; Müller et al., 2009). To compare the use of contextual information and visual information directly, the five sources were placed in categories of contextual and visual sources.
When performing actions under severe time pressure, the ability to anticipate is vital to performance. Skilled anticipation is underpinned by the use of both kinematic cues and contextual information, yet there have been few published reports examining how, and when, these two sources interact during anticipation.
This study employed a mixed experimental design. The between participants factor was skill level (skilled vs less-skilled) and the repeated measures factor was occlusion point (pre-run, mid-run, pre-release, post-release).
Altogether, 18 skilled and 18 less-skilled cricket batters anticipated deliveries from bowlers in a video-based simulation task where the footage was occluded at four-time points relative to ball release. Participants rated the importance of different sources of information when making their judgements at each occlusion point.
Skilled batters anticipated the deliveries significantly more accurately than the less-skilled group at all occlusion points (p < .05). The skilled group judged the use of both contextual information and visual information to be more important when anticipating compared to the less-skilled group. Kinematic cues were only considered important to anticipation in the final moments of the bowling sequence (i.e., immediately prior to ball release), whereas contextual information was used throughout the action, albeit mostly by the skilled group.
Findings enhance our understanding of the processes underpinning anticipation and present implications for the design of training programmes to improve anticipation.
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^☆: The experiment reported in this paper was supported through a research grant provided by School of Medical Sciences, RMIT University. Sincere thanks are expressed to School of Medical Sciences (particularly, Discipline of Exercise Sciences), all participants, Cricket Victoria (particularly, Chris Harris, David Saker and Greg Shipperd), Kookaburra (particularly, Peter Thompson), School of Aerospace and Engineering, RMIT University (particularly, Roger Labrooy and Sebastian Naselli) and Simon Rosalie (for reading earlier versions of this paper) for their contributions to the research.

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An in-situ examination of the timing of information pick-up for interception by cricket batsmen of different skill levels☆

Abstract

Objectives

Method

Results

Conclusions

Section snippets

Participants

Consistency of experimental conditions and reliability of dependent measures

Discussion

Journal of Science and Medicine in Sport

Journal of Science and Medicine in Sport

Skill in cricket batting: laboratory and applied evidence

Expertise and the perception of kinematic and situational probability information

Perception

Advanced cue utilisation by skilled cricket batsmen

The Australian Journal of Science and Medicine in Sport

Expert-novice differences in an applied selective attention task

Journal of Sport Psychology

Pick-up of essential kinematics underpins expert perception of movement patterns

Journal of Motor Behavior

The measurement of human skill

British Medical Journal

Do expertise and the degree of perception-action coupling affect natural anticipatory performance?

Perception

Discovering statistics: Using SPSS for windows

Batting stroke timing with a bowler and a bowling machine: a case study

The Australian Journal of Science and Medicine in Sport

The relative importance of perceptual information throughout the sections of a cricket ball's trajectory

Research and Reviews