Sports Performance Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

Sports Performance - Essay Example 17-55, 1987). The agents include the players, the coaches, as well as the referees. Ball allocation and play calling are examples of the numerous tasks involved, whereas the contexts can be during play as well as timeout. These factors interact together in different ways, and create several unique combinations, each of which requires a unique decision. This results in a wide array of situations in sports where decisions are required. One important step to learning about decision-making from sports is thus to weed out the main features of sports performance which make it practical and easy to study. Locating these features provides us with an essential step in comprehending the importance of sports as an epitome of decision-making situations. Studying decision-making (Diederich, pp. 157-166, 2003) in laboratory has one making disadvantage: the results may be inaccurate due to the unnatural environment. In sports, however, the player the researchers observe is under real pressure, and is fully responsible for his or her decision, which ultimately leads to their decision resembling the decision-making found in the real world. This advantage of studying decision-making is one that has only recently come into being appreciated for its worth (Bacharach, pp. 17-55, 1987). ... This feature of sports points out the danger of simulating a natural environment, and the importance of a naturalistic observation setting. The dynamics of sports decisions (Gold & Shadlen, pp. 10-16, 2001) are the second reason why they are ideal to study for the sake of decision-making research. The affect of this dynamism is twofold, to be found in both internal and external dynamics. Internal dynamics hold significance as they show that each decision is made over a course of deliberation, rather than spontaneously. Instead of simply making the decisions as they come, the player/decision-maker accumulates relevant information over a course of time and evaluates it at the time of decision-making. External dynamics, on the other hand, show that the situation itself fluctuates from time to time. At one moment, if the information is available (goalie position), it may be out of reach a second later due to obstruction in the view. These and other variables such as available options rev eal the dynamic nature of sports. Research (Gold & Shadlen, pp. 10-16, 2001) finds that decisions are made either ‘online’, or on a reflective basis. This also links the nature of sports to the dynamism earlier mentioned. Online-made decisions are examples of when the decision is made during the task, or under similar shortage of time. A player will make online decisions during the game. This is as opposed to the coach making the game strategy beforehand, using reflective decision-making techniques, which make thorough use of all the relevant information available. Movement control and decision-making (Mayes, pp. 441-461, 2003) go hand in hand when studying sports performance and this can be aided by cognitive modeling. Cognitive