Inattentional blindness and what it means for sport coaching practice

The sport performance environment is characterised as complex and rich due to the nature, volume, and occurance of information available to a player. However, the player's perceptual and cogntive resources are limited, so all the available information is unable to be 'perecived and considered' by the player. Players can miss pertinent information (cues to some, affordances to others) due to selective looking (Neisser, 1979: see here), mis-directed attention or non-awarness. 

Importantly, visual attention and visual perception are linked, although distinctive processes (Memmert, 2009).

Perception is recognised as key component of player decision-making. Sometimes referred to as "reading the play", you can only read what you can perceive. Research indicates that the visual perception capabilities of 'better' and 'lesser' players are not different. What is different is their perception - pattern recogntion, detection of  'cues' through selective attention and attention orientation, and determination of situational probablities (Memmert, 2009: see here). 

How coaches coach practice sessions are an influence on players developing perception.

Research by Furly and colleagues (2010, see here) showed that a coach can attentionally set a players perception by the instructions they provide. This 'setting' of the players attention can mean the players do not perceive (they miss) information important to effective in-activity (such as a practice task) and in-game decision making. This is different from attentional misdirection where the coach instructions have players focussing on the 'wrong' or less important 'cues' to decision-making.

Inattentional blindness is where attention is diverted such that the player fails to preceive information as it appears, even when it appears at fixation. The famous Simons and Chabris (1999) basketball passing attention demanding task while a gorilla appears is an example known by many (see the video here). Inattentional blindness is a failure of awareness - a failure to conciously perceive a stimulus that appears in our vision.

With consideration to cueing (Posner, 1980: see here), it seems reasonable to suggest that coaching should lead to an attentional benefit (some might call this optimal perception-action coupling) and not deficit, such as a inattentional blindness, attentional overload (divided attention from too much information), or attentional misdirection effects on players.

Research by Daniel Memmert and colleagues has made a direct link between inattentional blindness and player expertise and potential for in-play tactical creativity. This research suggested that players may fail to perceive optimal tactical solutions to the problem developing in the pattern of play as the player has been coached in a way that has narrowed the player's focus of attention. This narrowing may occur because of the repeated instructional direction of the coach, an overload of information or the repeated drilling of a way of perceiving and acting caused by the task design leading to a habituated limiting search strategy. Memmert recommends keeping practice 'playful' so attentional focus at practice is like that of match-play requirements (see here for a summary of this research). Supporting the direction to game-based practice, Williams and Ford (1998: see here) indicated increased experience of game situations leads to perceptual-cognitive advantages due to enhanced development of player pattern recognition - the ability to more accurately and faster detect and recognise meaningful patterns in the play from a superior search and determination ability.

Recent research on player scanning (gaze behaviour) supports coaching to help players develop their capability to locate and perceive visual information using game-like (e.g., Jordet et al, 2020; Askum, 2020), some might say representative, practices. 

Selectivelly allocating attention towards the important task-related information is possibliy the most influential skill developed by expert players (Brams et al., 2019). This ability is not enhanced in what I have described elsewhere as 'off-the-line' one at a time 'marker to marker' 'down the line' practice tasks where performance information available to the player is narrowed to that enabling a singular repeated predictable response. 

What does this mean for the practitioner coach?

"One important lesson from this, that coaches at all levels should learn, is: train more in real matches!"

Askum, 2022, here

This is not 'new advice'. I have written elsewhere that in an Australian context, the first coach developer of a sport in Australia - Eric Worthington, was advising in the early 1970's that "to effect the best transfer from what is done in training session, practices should be used which are similar to those players face in the game...the more realistic a practice the better the transfer will be" (if you are interested in Worthington's coaching ideas, they are summarised here)

In the sport I coach, Australian footbal (AFL), back in1979 Davis and Fitzclarence recognised the need for greater alignment between the practice drills and the demands of the game: ie., more game-form practice. Dawson et al. (2004) suggested more game-form 'contested' training to ensure players 'train as they play'. Berry and colleagues (2008) found more expert players were differentiated by accrual of a greater volume of deliberate play during adolescence. Loader et al. (2012) concluded that the game-specific activities better replicated the movement characteristics of competitive game play. We find this type of research findings across all team sports. Thus for coaches, careful thought about the balance between game form/game-based practice (which I refer to as play with purpose) and non game form practice is necessary, giving consideration to "learning to play" as being closely related to the presence (or absence) of representation of the information presenting in the game. A central element in game-based coaching is asking players pertinent questions in preference to telling or directing the players to enable players to develop their situational awareness for enhanced decision-making: i.e., develop 'thinking players'. The pedagogy of questioning is the  distinctive verbal behaviour of the coach when using a game-based approach.

Although research suggests more expert players can be differentiated by a greater accumulation of deliberate play during adolescence, there is often quoted that coaches are too focussed on 'drills' and not encouraging enough play with purpose in their session design.

"The view of the three-time premiership coach is that young footballers right down to under-10s are being subjected to far too many training drills and not enough football. Footballers are being drafted into AFL clubs not boasting adequate decision-making skills as a result."

Journalist Caroline Wilson commenting on the thoughts of x4 AFL Premiership Coach, Alistair Clarkson here

"(coaching my daughters team) was all about having fun and playing games, but getting them to learn along the way…I took that formula along to my AFL coaching" Damien Hardwick, 3x AFL Premiership Coach, interviewed on the Great Coaches Podcast, discsuuing one of the changes to his coaching that brought premiership success, here

If you are interested in reading more, I expland on the ideas in this blog for sport coaching in the Chapter: Game Sense Coaching: Developing Thinking Players, available here.

If you are interested in reading more about the use of questioning strategies in sport coaching, you may be interested to read here