Abstract des Autors

It is hypothesized that in team sports, the superiority of experts at adapting to changes in the environment is due to schematic mental structures by means of which they liken the current situation to an isomorphic situation already encountered. Our approach consisted of varying the constraints (the dimensions of the playing areas) of a standardized one-to-one duel task in order to reproduce the spatial conditions encountered in real play, and to evaluate the ability of subjects of different skill levels to adapt to these variations. The results showed that the experts were better at adapting to the modifications than the non-experts, which seems to demonstrate the existence of schemata that direct information processing towards the relevant characteristics of the situation. Such schemata are expectation systems containing knowledge about the invariants of familiar situations. Verf.-Referat