Issue link: http://ncumarketing.uberflip.com/i/1453554
I will start with the first topic area – Perceptual-cognitive skills in sports refer to the decision-making abilities of athletes, most often in dynamic ball type sports such as tennis, baseball, soccer, and football. Specifically, when athletes make decisions, they need to first attend to relevant cues from the environment, anticipate what will happen next, generate plausible options and order them, choose the best option and execute the decision. Researchers have examined the various components of the decision-making process and have found that experts make better decisions because of their ability to attend to relevant cues and anticipate what will happen next earlier and more accurately. In research I conducted in the area with soccer players, an interesting finding emerged. Specifically, that one of the main components that distinguish experts from non-experts is the ability to focus only on plausible options when considering a decision. This enables them to reduce noise and consider only relevant options that will lead to successful outcomes. On the other hand, lower-level soccer players consider much more irrelevant options, which leads to a slower decision-making process and a higher probability of choosing a non-optimal decision. Furthermore, it was also found that anticipation and options generation is positively and moderately correlated. This finding is important as it indicates that the various components of the decision-making process are related and dependent on each other (for more details see Basevitch et al., 2020). Dr. Itay Basevitch, PhD Hello, my name is Itay Basevitch, and I would like to share with you some interesting findings from research I conducted in the topic areas of (a) perceptual-cognitive skills in sports and (b) the exercise-cognition link. These are areas that my research is focused on and are my main interest areas. 10 Northcentral University Psychology Bulletin