The Role Of Working Memory Capacity in Soccer Tactical Decision Making At Diferent Levels Of Expertise Part 1

Abstract

Athletic skills acquired through deliberate practice are essential for expert sports performance. Some authors even suggest that practice circumvents the limits of working memory capacity (WMC) in skill acquisition. However, this circumvention hypothesis has been challenged recently by the evidence that WMC plays an important role in expert performance in complex domains such as arts and sports. 

Deliberate practice refers to training in a planned and systematic way to improve skills and learn new knowledge. Memory is one of the important intellectual abilities of human beings. It is related to an individual's ability to think and store knowledge and information.

In deliberate practice, purposeful repeated practice can strengthen the connections of the brain's nervous system and improve the response speed of neurons. This can strengthen body and brain coordination, improve movement skills, and improve performance levels. At the same time, through deliberate practice, people can also improve their knowledge and understanding of things, increase the depth of memory, and integrate new knowledge into the existing knowledge framework, thereby deepening memory.

Not only that, deliberate practice can also help people reduce distractions. Only through focused practice can you truly improve your skill level and memory. Therefore, deliberate practice can not only train skills but also improve personal psychological qualities, including endurance, perseverance, self-confidence, etc. These qualities are also one of the keys to success.

In daily life, we often encounter things that need to be remembered, such as phone numbers, passwords, study notes, etc. Only through deliberate practice and repeated reinforcement can we truly retain this information. This reduces errors and mistakes caused by poor memory and increases personal productivity.

In short, deliberate practice and memory are complementary to each other and are closely related. Through deliberate practice, you can strengthen the depth of memory and improve memory effects, thereby laying a solid foundation for personal success. Therefore, we should focus on daily deliberate practice and use it as an effective way to improve ourselves, so that we can grow better and meet a higher life. It can be seen that we need to improve our memory. Cistanche deserticola can significantly improve memory because Cistanche deserticola is a traditional Chinese medicinal material with many unique effects, one of which is to improve memory. The efficacy of minced meat comes from the various active ingredients it contains, including acid, polysaccharides, flavonoids, etc. These ingredients can promote brain health in various ways.

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Here, we have used two dynamic soccer tactical tasks to explore the effect of WMC on tactical performance at different levels of expertise. As expected, professional soccer players exhibited better tactical performance than amateur and recreational players. Furthermore, WMC predicted faster and more accurate tactical decisions in the task under auditory distraction and faster tactical decisions in the task without distraction. Importantly, lack of expertise×WMC interaction suggests that the WMC effect exists at all levels of expertise. 

Our results speak against the circumvention hypothesis and support a model of independent contributions of WMC and deliberate practice on expert performance in sports.

Keywords :

Working memory capacity, Expertise, Deliberate practice, Tactical decision-making, Soccer.

Significance statement

What are the sources of expertise is one of the central topics in cognitive psychology. In this regard, the important question that remains unresolved is whether working memory capacity contributes to experts’ performance or whether its limits could be circumvented by many hours of deliberate practice in a specific domain. Here, we examined this question in the context of decision-making in sports. We asked soccer players at different levels of expertise (professional, amateur, and recreational) to judge the next best move for a player shown in a short video clip. 

The video clips depicted real-life situations routinely encountered by players during a match. The results provide clear evidence for a unique contribution of working memory capacity to the decision-making performance at all levels of expertise. Such findings support models that assume the existence of a general or domain-free control mechanism with limited capacity whose impact on behavior cannot be overridden by extensive practice in the domain. In other words, our data suggest that working memory capacity and deliberate practice make independent contributions to expert performance in sports.

Introduction

The view that expert performance is largely, and perhaps even entirely, a reflection of training history has held sway in the scientific literature on expertise for decades (Ericsson et al., 1993). This view was championed by Ericsson and colleagues (Ericsson et al., 1993), who argued that innate "talent", genetically prescribed traits, and characteristics, play little if any direct role in expert performance, except in the case of body size and height (Ericsson et al., 2007). This "nurture" view of expert performance is also popular among non-scientists. 

For example, reflecting on his career, the former basketball superstar Michael Jordan once commented, "I practice as if I am playing the game. So, when the moment comes in the game, it is not new to me. That is the beauty of the game of basketball; that is the reason why you practice; that is the effort. So, when you get to that moment, you do not have to think. Instinctively things happen."

A testable prediction that follows from Ericsson and colleagues’ theory has been termed the "circumvention of-limits hypothesis" (Hambrick & Meinz, 2011). According to this hypothesis, through extended deliberate practice "performers can acquire skills that circumvent basic limits of working memory capacity (WMC) and sequential processing" (Ericsson & Charness, 1994, p. 725). In particular, deliberate practice leads to the development of extended or long-term working memory (LTWM) that enables experts to bypass reliance on WMC in the performance of domain-relevant tasks.

LT-WM is a domain-specific portion of long-term memory that relies on efficient encoding strategies and retrieval structures that facilitate memory storage and retrieval (Ericsson & Kintsch, 1995). It is thought that LT-WM contributes to the superior performance of expert chess players, as revealed by seminal studies on expertise (Chase & Simon, 1973a, 1973b; de Groot, 1965), and to the superior perceptual-cognitive skills exhibited by experts in many sports (Mann et al., 2007; Williams & Ford, 2008).

The circumvention-of-limits hypothesis received support from studies showing diminished or no effect of WMC on expert performance in domain-specific tasks. For example, in the study of Hambrick et al. (2012), visuospatial ability predicted geological bedrock mapping performance at low but not at high levels of geological knowledge. Furthermore, Sohn and Doane (2003) found the LT-WM×WMC interaction revealed a reduced impact of WMC on aviation situation awareness among more skilled pilots.

However, there is also evidence that individual differences in many domains are not just a product of deliberate practice but also depend on cognitive abilities (Hambrick & Meinz, 2011; Hambrick et al., 2014a, 2014b; Macnamara et al., 2014, 2016). Hambrick et al. (2016) emphasized that WMC, or the capacity to control and coordinate processes and storage during the performance of complex cognitive tasks (Miyake & Shah, 1999), is a significant piece of the expertise puzzle because it regulates and maintains relevant information in an active state in the service of complex cognition. 

Support for this independent influence hypothesis (e.g., Hambrick & Oswald, 2005) comes from studies showing that WMC affects performance even in skilled artists and athletes. Meinz and Hambrick (2010) found that the positive effect of WMC on piano sight-reading exists in pianists with high as well as with low levels of deliberate practice. 

The additive effect of WMC, independent of domain-specific knowledge, has also found empirical support in baseball-related tasks. WMC positively predicted performance beyond and independent of knowledge in the baseball and baseball-analogy spaceship task (Hambrick & Oswald, 2005) and in tracking baseball game-relevant and irrelevant information (Hambrick & Engle, 2002). 

Furthermore, Meinz et al. (2012) found WMC to be an equally important predictor of performance on crucial poker skills at low and high knowledge levels of Texas Hold’Em poker. These findings challenged the circumvention-of-limits hypothesis and became the subject matter of the intense scientific debate on the relative contributions of deliberate practice and WMC on expert performance (Ericsson, 2014, 2016; Hambrick et al., 2014a, 2014b).

Contrasting findings regarding the role of WMC in expert performance suggest that there may exist a potential moderator variable that conceals the effect of WMC in some studies. 

Hambrick et al. (2012) proposed that a type of task used in the study is a moderator variable. Unchanging input in static tasks, such as bedrock mapping (Hambrick et al., 2012), allows skilled participants to employ efficient encoding strategies and robust retrieval structures. In this way, they circumvent the need to engage capacity-limited working memory. By contrast, continuously changing input in dynamic tasks makes it difficult for the participant to rapidly encode information and retrieve it from long-term memory using knowledge-based retrieval structures. 

Consequently, dynamic tasks engage working memory to a greater degree, which increases the chance of detecting the WMC effect even in highly skilled performers. Furthermore, dynamic tasks have a higher ecological validity because they incorporate some of the critical components of different sports, which are, according to Moran (2009), a "rich and dynamic laboratory for the study of how the mind works" (p. 422).

Furley and Memmert (2010) argued that the field of team sports is a promising avenue for testing and advancing cognitive psychological theories. Along these lines, Furley and Memmert (2012) were the first to employ dynamic tactical decision-making tasks to study the role of WMC in the tactical performance of team-ball sports. In two experiments, the authors investigated whether WMC is predictive of tactical performance under distraction and additional demand to resolve response competition. 

In Experiment 1, the authors utilized a time-constrained tactical decision-making task under auditory distraction with stimuli consisting of basketball game stills representing offensive tactical decisions. Participants had to decide whether a marked player with a ball should shoot, cut/dribble, or pass the ball within 1,000 ms of stimulus presentation and 750 ms of the fixation cross. 

Distraction stimuli, auditory information that should be ignored during tactical decision-making task, was modeled on the selective attention paradigm and dichotic listening studies (Conway et al., 2001; Wood & Cowan, 1995). High-WMC athletes were expected to exhibit better tactical performance while inhibiting distraction and focusing on tactical tasks.

In Experiment 2, participants decided whether the player holding the puck should shoot, pass, or make a solo effort within 1,000 ms of stimulus presentation and 3,000  ms of the mask. Specific to Experiment 2, along with regular trials, the ice hockey decision-making tasks contained team time-out trials, in which the recommended tactical decision for the following situation was valid 66% of the time. 

However, in the rest of the timeout trials, the recommended tactical decision was not optimal. By inducing interference conditions as in the Stroop paradigm (Kane & Engle, 2003; Long & Prat, 2002), authors hypothesized that high-WMC athletes would be less likely to follow non-valid tactical recommendations in time-out trials and better adjust tactical decisions to the current situation.

The results showed that higher WMC predicts higher accuracy in tactical decisions of basketball players under distraction and hockey players in interference conditions. Furthermore, high-WMC basketball players were better at focusing on tactical decisions, as they detected their name in the distracting auditory message less frequently than low-WMC basketball players. This study provided unique and valuable evidence of the role of WMC in ball sports situations.

Despite its novelty and theoretical relevance, several aspects of Furley and Memmert’s (2012) study raise a concern. For example, they used an extreme-group design, whereby only participants who achieve the highest and lowest scores on the relevant variable are taken into analysis. In the present context, this involves creating a set of discrete categories from a continuous WMC measure and analyzing only those categories representing the upper and lower end of the WMC distribution. Commonly, scores that fall in the upper and lower quartile are used in the analysis (Conway et al., 2005). 

Given the very pointed distribution of WMC scores in their study, in contrast to the distribution that Kane et al. (2004) observed in the same task, Furley and Memmert (2012) classified the highest 20% of the WMC distribution as high-WMC athletes and the lowest 20% as low-WMC athletes. The discretization of a continuous variable discards variation in individual scores and may result in increased Type I error, spurious correlation, and inefficient, distorted, or less accurate effect size estimates (Conway et al., 2005; Gelman & Park, 2009; Iacobucci et al., 2015). 

This concern is even more exaggerated with the small number of participants in the study of Furley and Memmert (2012) (n=28). In addition, the sample in their study did not include professional or expert-level athletes. Thus, it was not possible to conclusively answer whether expertise moderates the impact of WMC on tactical decision-making.

A recent study by Vaughan and Laborde (2021) on basketball players at different levels of expertise (including elite and super-elite athletes) examined the moderating role of expertise in the relationship between spatial working memory and free-throw performance. 

The results showed a slightly stronger relationship between visuospatial WMC and free-throw performance among superelite and elite compared to amateur and novice youth basketball players, suggesting a moderating role of athletic expertise. 

This study, together with another study showing a correlation between the visuospatial ability of young soccer players and several measures of soccer performance (Glavaš, 2020), supports the theoretical relevance of the working memory capacity in sports. However, both studies tested only the visuospatial component of the working memory (Baddeley, 2003) because they used the Corsi-Block task (Corsi, 1973) to assess the visuospatial short-term memory span. Furthermore, Glavaš (2020) did not operationalize skill levels at all, whereas the average age of the sample in Vaughan and Laborde’s (2021) study was slightly above 19 (SD=1,01). 

This raises the question of the exact level of expertise of these athletes. More specifically, although Vaughan and Laborde (2021) classified elite and super-elite athletes based on Swann et al.’s (2015) recommendations, their participants were primarily involved in training and competition (3,3–9,7  years) below-senior levels. 

Thus, although participants were engaged in deliberate practice, they still might not reach truly expert levels of performance that would be less dependent on basic cognitive abilities. Finally, Vaughan and Laborde (2021) measured performance using only a single task, a basketball free-throw task.

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