Exploring the Effectiveness of Immersive Video for Training Decision-Making Capability in Elite, Youth Basketball Players

Decision-making is an essential capability for success in team sport athletes. Good decision-making is underpinned by perceptual-cognitive skills that allow athletes to assess the environment and choose the correct choice from a number of alternatives. Previous research has demonstrated that decision-making can be trained “off-line” by exposing athletes to gameplay scenarios and having them make decisions based on the information presented to them. These scenarios are typically presented on television monitors or using life-size projections but recent advances in immersive video capabilities provide opportunities to improve the fidelity of training by presenting a realistic, 360° view of the competition environment. The purpose of this study was to assess the effectiveness of immersive video training and whether training would improve decision-making performance in elite, youth basketball players (male and female). A training group completed 10 or 12 immersive video (360° video presented in a head-mounted display) training sessions in which they viewed and responded to gameplay scenarios across 3-weeks while the control group only participated in their usual training routine. Performance was assessed on an immersive video test and during small-sided games (SSG). The male training group had a large, non-significant improvement on immersive test score (+4.0 points) and in the SSG (+5.8 points) compared to the male control group (+0.3 points and +1.0 points, respectively). While both the female control group (+9.7 points) and training group (7.4 points) had large improvements in the immersive training test, only the female control improved their performance in the SSG (+6.9 points). Despite the mixed findings, there may be benefit for using immersive video for training decision-making skill in team sports. The implications of these findings (e.g., gender of the actors used to create stimuli, variety of scenarios presented) and the limitations of the experiment are discussed.