Research trends of perceptual-cognitive skills in decision-making on soccer:

Implications for coaching science

Abstract

    Accurately judging a situation during soccer is one of the important factors for executing superior performance. In order to acquire decision making ability, in practice and instruction sessions, it is considered desirable to adapt scientific knowledge to coaches' rules of thumb and experiences. However, it has been pointed out that practice and instructions based on scientific evidence are hardly executed. Therefore, in this review, we aimed to examine the relationship between the perceptual-cognitive skills and coaching science related to decision making for the perceptual-cognitive skill research in soccer through an overview of the research results that have been clarified so far about each factor of pattern recognition, visual search behaviors, and anticipation that constitute perceptual-cognitive skills, and the knowledge that supports them. In addition, one of the important tasks in perceptual-cognitive skill research is acquiring perceptual-cognitive skills and developing effective coaching and training methods. Therefore, from the standpoint of motor learning research, we discuss future works on perceptual-cognitive skills of soccer, while exploring the relationship between acquisition of perceptual-cognitive skills and coaching science. It is suggested that the theoretical background clarified through this review would be useful for obtaining scientific knowledge about decision making in an environment with severe temporal and spatial constraints.