Position-Specific Attentional Skills in Team Sports: A Comparison between Defensive and Offensive Football Players

Over the last few decades, technical as well cognitive skills and their relation to position-specific skill requirements have been extensively investigated indicators for players’ performance in team sports. To explore impact of positioning football on inattentional blindness we employed dynamic tasks that presented an unexpected object analyzed its noticing rates three different experiments. In Experiment 1, amateur expert players performed a well-established task counting number times basketball was passed between two groups while unexpected, non-sport specific introduced situation. Noticing were higher strikers compared other playing positions. The findings support advantage regarding more offensive defensive players. Using same task, this finding 2 detail, i.e., by differentiating Results revealed (in particular strikers) observed objects frequently than 3 used newly developed football-specific requiring participants find solutions game situations with free-standing player appearing one these situations. Defensive again showed mid-fielders), perceived unmarked often. This indicates not only differ conscious perception are irrelevant sport function position, but also show differences when relevant is useful tactical given Our provide further insight into importance definition