Institute of Sport Science

Research projects

Contextual priors in complex decision making

Sports games constantly challenge athletes to make decisions under time pressure. On the one hand, these decisions are based on the athlete’s current perception and the predictions derived from movements of other players or objects; while on the other hand, such decisions draw from prior contextual knowledge of the probabilities in the situation’s development. According to Bayesian principles, both of these sources of information are integrated to form an understanding of the present state (Körding & Wolpert, 2006). In a virtual sports environment, we investigate the role of contextual knowledge in the decision making of central handball defenders, who must defend incoming shots alongside either more strong or less strong teammates (see video). Our findings suggest that experts use self-generated contextual knowledge about the relative strength of their teammates better than near-experts (Magnaguagno & Hossner, 2020). When explicit information about the relative strengths of their teammates is provided, experts benefit only when the certainty of the information is high; whereas near-experts appear to benefit from explicit information with high or low certainty (Magnaguagno et al., 2022).

Selected Publications:

Magnaguagno, L. & Hossner, E.-J. (2020). The impact of self-generated and explicitly acquired contextual knowledge on anticipatory performance. Journal of Sports Sciences, 38(18), 2108–2117. 10.1080/02640414.2020.1774142

Magnaguagno, L., Zahno, S., Kredel, R. & Hossner, E.-J. (2022). Contextual information in situations of uncertainty: The value of explicit-information provision depends on expertise level, knowledge acquisition and prior-action congruency. Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 59, 102109. 10.1016/j.psychsport.2021.102109

Literature:

Körding, K. P. & Wolpert, D. M. (2006). Bayesian decision theory in sensorimotor control. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 10(7), 319–326. 10.1016/j.tics.2006.05.003