Abstract des Autors

Two studies were carried out to examine target detection and attentional flexibility in basketball and tennis players. In the first study, 140 basketball players of 3 age-categories and two skill- levels (high and low) were exposed to 80 game scenes, half structured and half transitional, with only 50% of them containing an "exceptional" target. They were asked to scan the computerized display and decide whether an exceptional target is absent or present as fast as possible. The results indicated that with experience/age, decision time is faster and high skill results in more accurate decisions across all ages. In the second study, high and low skill-level tennis players from 3 different age-categories performed a computerized tennis task which consisted of priming a response 80% of the time if preceded by an x) and examining the reaction time in the "benefit" (80%), "cost" (20%), and "neutral" (50%) conditions during 0.5, 1.0, and 2.0 seconds interval bewteen warning and imperative stimuli. The results revealed that with experience, reaction time become faster in all 3 conditions, and high skill players gain more from the "benefit" that "cost" condition, contary to results obtained by less skilled players. Both studies failed to show that differences in attentional flexibility and target detection increase with experience and skill-level. Several explanations are suggested which relate to the extent that computerized tasks can mimic the requirements of the true game decisions. Verf.-Referat