Abstract

To study the attentional resources of expert athletes, we have adopted an experimental paradigm using a pre-cueing method based on POSNER, SNYDER and DAVIDSON (1980). Subjects were cued to attend to one of four possible stimulous locations, which were arrayed horizontally. The instructions were to respond as fast as possible to the occurence of a visual stimulus, regardless of whether it occurred in a cued or in an uncued location. In 79 of the cued trials, the stimulus was presented in the cued location and in the remaining 21 in one of the uncued locations. In addition, there were trials in which no directional cue was given, subjects having to pay attention to all four locations. Our hypothesis was that expert athletes as compared to non expert subjects would be able to optimize the distribution of attentional resources in the visual space, by increasing the benefits and decreasing the costs. The results showed that target eccentricity affects reaction time: the subjects were slower to detect far targets than near ones. But the near-far stimulus difference was smaller for the experts than for the non experts. Moreover, unlike the non experts, the expert athletes were generally not affected by cue conditions. Expert subjects seemed to reduce the costs and the benefits, behaving very steadily. Yet, some differences appeared, according to the sports skill of the experts. Verf.-Referat (gekuerzt)