Brunswik’s representative design and the study of visual anticipation in sport

Previous work has proposed that expertise in fast-ball sports including cricket and tennis is underpinned by an ability to anticipate the movements of an opponent prior to the onset of ball-flight information. Visual anticipation skill is believed to be predicated on the use of different visual information between skilled and less-skilled sportspeople as evidence by studies examining athlete gaze behaviours. However, the experimental conditions utilised to study such visual anticipation skill have been criticised over concerns that they fail to adequately sample the conditions of sport environments (for a review, see Dicks, Davids, & Button, 2009). For example, the vast majority of visual anticipation studies have tended to present observers with two-dimensional video displays that degrade the ambient array of optical information available to athletes in natural (in situ) environments. Moreover, a related and central limitation of visual anticipation studies (both video and in situ conditions) has been the failure to offer athletes opportunities to utilise functional movement responses in response to the opponent’s action.