Visual scanning before receiving a ball (McGuckian et al. 2018)
To understand footballers’ visual scanning strategies, the players were fitted with sensors. These recorded head rotations, coupled with video analysis.
Then, by comparing the number of head movements measured before gaining possession with the head-rotation data, the authors brought out a particularly interesting finding. Indeed, as footballers get closer to receiving the ball, the frequency and amplitude of head movement increase!
In particular, this increase in exploratory behaviour in the 4 seconds before receiving the ball is strongly correlated with the type of action that will follow. A specific point to draw players’ attention to during visual training aimed at anticipating opponents’ actions? This approach is similar to what we observed in our study on wayfinding with eye-tracking for the SNCF.
Effect of restricting visual information on football-specific skills (Beavan et al. 2018)
This study made use of stroboscopic glasses to understand the importance of visual information for technical abilities in football. These glasses interrupt the optical flow intermittently: normal vision for 266 ms, occluded vision for 620 ms.
In a situation where footballers received a ball and had to send it straight back to a target, the accuracy of expert players was more affected than that of novice players! Bearing in mind that the baseline accuracy (i.e. without stroboscopic glasses) of expert players is better than that of novices. So it’s possible that intermittent occlusion brings expert players’ performance closer to novice levels. Is this relationship between football and the brain a bit clearer? If you’d like to know more about cognitive and emotional states in sport, discover our neuroergonomics training.
Since training adaptations are known to result from a constraint that is sufficient to “force” those adaptations, could this kind of equipment let experts keep progressing in acquiring technical moves? That said, further studies are needed to confirm this!
Effect of cognitive load on the use of contextual information during anticipation actions in football (Gredin et al. 2018)
The authors studied the influence of footballers’ cognitive load level on the use of information that lets them anticipate their opponents’ future actions. The originality of this study was, in particular, the use of electroencephalography. This is an electrical measure of the brain’s activity, aimed at objectively measuring the level of cognitive load imposed by the context. To dig deeper into these research methods, you can check out our article on focus groups, which gather a diversity of points of view on a topic.
The authors showed subjects videos of situations that allowed them to anticipate the behaviour of opposing players, while the subjects were also carrying out a cognitive task in parallel. The subjects had to predict the opponents’ future behaviour.
As key results, the authors showed that using anticipation information improves performance in judging opponents’ future actions in a low-cognitive-load context. By contrast, this isn’t the case in high-cognitive-demand contexts.
It’s also worth noting that using contextual information raises the measured cognitive load level, even though footballers aren’t aware of it!
In other words, the two-way relationship between anticipatory expertise and cognitive challenge is a central factor in performance, one worth looking into to move towards expertise.
What can we conclude about football and the brain?
These study summaries on football and the brain show us the diversity of approaches undertaken to grasp some of the mechanisms at work in developing footballing expertise. But these results presented at a conference should be treated with caution, and compared with the existing literature to get a sense of how solid they are. On our side, we have also carried out studies in sport. And more specifically in esports! Discover our approach to improving the performance of esport players through the optimisation of cognitive abilities.
In the end, these paths look promising with a view to a future third star!
