ANTICIPATION AND CONFIDENCE OF DECISIONS RELATED TO SKILLED PERFORMANCE

This study was carried out to examine anticipatory decisions of novice , intermediate, and expert tennis players and the confidence with whic h these decisions are made by these athletes. Perceived eye-focus was also measured to verify whether it is related to expertise level prior to action execution. Forty-five players, 15 in each skill category, w ere exposed to 6 temporal occluded film conditions (480, 320, 160 ms p rior to racquet-ball contact, at contact, and 160 and 320 ms after con tract) in randomized order within 8 tennis strokes. In each condition, after viewing the filmed sequence, they were asked to report the fina l ball location of the opponent's stroke, how confident they were in t his decision, and their perceived eye-focus location during the sequen ce. The results indicated that experts and intermediates were superior in anticipatory decisions to their counterparts, only under short exp osure durations. Novices showed more confidence than experts and inter mediates at the beginning of the sequence, but after 160 and 320 ms of ball-racquet contact, experts were much more confident than novices a nd intermediates. Self-reported eye-focus differed substantially with respect to expertise level. While experts attended to several location s prior to ball-racquet contact, intermediate and novice players gazed at one location. After contact, the reverse was evident. The findings are in partial agreement with other studies which have applied the te mporal occlusion paradigm to study expert-novice differences in antici patory skills.