Time to broaden the scope of research on anticipatory behavior: a case for the role of probabilistic information

Citation: Cañal-Bruland R and Mann DL (2015) Time to broaden the scope of research on anticipatory behavior: a case for the role of probabilistic information. Over the past four decades we have seen a dramatic improvement in our understanding of the processes that underpin the anticipatory behavior of skilled performers in domains such as sport. and many of us who follow in their footsteps. Originally, the key question driving this research was whether skilled performers of temporally constrained sport tasks (e.g., returning a tennis serve or hitting a baseball) are better than less-skilled performers in their ability to make use of kinematic information from an opponent's action. After confirming the expert advantage in anticipation, research then focused on identifying the kinematic sources of information that underpin the superior anticipatory behavior. This research made use of a variety of experimental paradigms including temporal and spatial occlusion techniques, point-light displays, and gaze tracking (for a review see Mann and Savelsbergh, 2015). Since the 1970s an impressive body of empirical data has been generated that has led to useful practical outcomes for the individual sports examined, and that at the same time have resulted in more generalizable findings across sports, thereby generating a better understanding of the mechanisms underlying expert anticipation. As a case in point, it is now generally accepted that experts tend to make use of fewer fixations of longer duration when trying to predict the outcome of an opponent's action (for a meta-analysis supporting this conclusion, see e.g., Mann et al., 2007). There can be little doubt that this research focusing on the kinematic sources of information that facilitate the prediction of action outcomes has proven to be very insightful and important for furthering our understanding of expert anticipation in sports (Abernethy, 1990; Williams and Davids, 1998). Likewise, this research has been crucial for generating evidence-based recommendations for the best means to train anticipatory skill. However, here we call for a broadening in the scope of anticipation research in an attempt to further improve and enrich our understanding of expert anticipation in sport. This call is based on the high proportion of studies performed examining anticipatory behavior on the basis of kinematic sources of information, yet a relative paucity in studies that take into consideration the influence of broader situational or contextual (non-kinematic) sources of information. As early as in the late 1970s researchers identified that anticipatory behavior may at …