| The central theme of our research programme is the role of psychological constraints in perceiving and realizing affordances in sport. The general goal is to gain insight into the effects of psychological factors such as attention, mental imagery and anxiety on perceiving and moving in sport. Three subthemes are perception, cognition and emotion with the following objectives: [Perception] - The main objective is to gain insight into the role of perception in recognizing and realizing affordances in sport. Specifically the roles of attention, looking behaviour, game insight and anticipation in perceiving and moving in sport are investigated as well as the interaction between dorsal and ventral stream visual information processing. In addition, we investigate the relation between positioning and orienting of sport participants on decision-making in sport. Finally, we wish to gain insight into the possible contribution of visual attention training on sport performance. [Cognition] - While the main objective is to gain insight into the role of cognition in perceiving and moving in sport, the research specifically focusses on the effects of imagery on perception and movement execution, and on the role of implicit and explicit knowledge in skill acquisition. [Emotion] - The main objective here is to find out what the influence is of state variables (of the athlete) on perceiving and realizing affordances in sport, with specific attention to the roles of anxiety and fatigue. We approach the above questions from a number of experimental paradigms: effects of anxiety on climbing on a climbing wall; visual information processing and looking behaviour in basketball jump shooting; effects of imagery on wall climbing, dancing and a simple pointing task; effects of fatigue on judging the slope of a surface; orienting, anticipating and decision-making in football (soccer). |
