Abstract
Sports instruction entails bodily movements undertaken by students and teachers in spacious settings. For this reason, sports instructors are required to possess greater spatial cognition, physical cognition of students, cognition of the level of energy present in lessons and predictive cognition in physical education classes than they do in classroom lessons. In this context, we investigated situational cognition in this paper by recruiting a university soccer club coach who also served as a J-League youth team coach and had him observe a J-League game from pitch level while imagining that he was the coach. The subject was instructed to orally relate what he was seeing as a coach from pitch level in real time and sketch whatever image he was seeing or processing in his head in real time, whereupon a cognitive review of the narration and supporting sketches was conducted after the game. As a result, it became clear that the space visually perceived as a horizontal plane from pitch level was understood in terms of representations based on a bird's-eye view of the pitch from above and in terms of representations based on a wide-angle depth-conveying view of the pitch from a slightly elevated location and that predictions of what would occur next were being made through a process that involved the successive overlaying of representations onto representations.