Research on visual search behaviors of basketball players at different levels of sports expertise

This study aims to examine visual search strategies of skilled basketball players in an anticipation task. This study selected 48 experienced and inexperienced basketball players. The participants were grouped into novice and expert groups based on their experience. The participants were asked to look at series of pictures of offensive patterns of play in a basketball game from a third person perspective and chose one of the three options: passing, shooting and break through. This study measured and recorded the response time, key pressing results, and eye movements. Eye movement data were recorded using the Tobii X-3 120 eye tracker. The results showed that, the expert group demonstrated superior anticipation performance, and were more accuracy. In addition, the results showed that participants in the expert group and faster predicted the offensive way faster than the novice group. The results also showed that experienced basketball players employed a simple and efficient visual search strategy including greater fixation counts and longer fixation duration on more informative areas than the novice group. Furthermore, the visualization metrics showed that the expert group had a more concise fixation trajectory and focused mainly on key information area. Generally, expert players exhibited a more efficient and effective visual search strategy demonstrating better performance on anticipation tasks.