Participants have been asked to respond to the nearly “life-sized” video stimulation with a motor action of shooting, passing or dribbling the ball. The results revealed that experts had significantly quicker reaction times, higher accuracy rate of their decisions and used the time available for search of the information more efficiently than novice. Eye movement date showed that experts demonstrated fewer long time fixations on selected area of the display which made their visual search far more economical and significantly faster compared to novice. Experts allocated their attention mostly on any potential areas of free space, whereas novice focus their gaze on areas of less sophisticated sources of information such as the position of the players, the ball and the goal. Similar results have been reported by Williams, Davids, Burwitz and Williams (1994) who compared visual search ability of experienced and inexperience football defenders. The participants have been asked to watch offensive video simulation from eleven versus eleven matches predicting the directions of the pass being played by the defender. Typically, more experienced players responded prior to defenders making a contact with the ball or …show more content…
Hanin (2000) hypothesized that only under the condition of optimal emotion an athlete is able to effectively used available to him resources facilitating elite performance. While, dysfunctional emotion can lead an athlete to an inefficient and inappropriate use of resources and focusing attention on irrelevant stimuli. Easterbrook (1959) concluded that high physiological arousal narrows individual’s attention focus. Williams and Elliot (1999) reported that very high level of anxiety may increase in the number of fixation and attention narrowing. Janelle, Singer and Williams (1999) showed that a higher level of anxiety increases the time necessary for the detection of relevant cues and discrimination of irrelevant information. Moreover, studies with intermediate-level golf players showed that performance under high-anxiety conditions requires greater mental effort and decreases the duration of a final fixation (Wilson et al.,