The impact of multimodal perception on decision-making in sport

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Stefanie Klatt
• Subject Area: Personality Psychology, Clinical and Medical Psychology, Methodology
• Term: from 2018 to 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 398743266

In a variety of everyday situations, the timely and adequate reaction to different events and stimuli, such as in road traffic or sports, is of essential importance. For example, many fast team sports demand to simultaneously record and cognitively process a ball as well as the positional play of other players as quickly as possible. Most sensory impressions that enter the human brain are conveyed by the sense of sight. Furthermore, the auditory system is responsible for the information absorption in the context of the knowledge acquisition. The simultaneous perception and processing of information with various sensory modalities, such as seeing and hearing, is referred to as multimodality. Distinct multimedial learning theories assume—based on Baddeley’s (1992, 2002) working memory model—that visual and auditory information are proceeded in two different subsystems of working memory and that their interaction leads to improvements in learning performance. Until now, phenomena of multimodal interaction are still widely unexplored in sport science. Among others, this is because of the complexity and dynamic in the fast team sports, where the influence of physical strains should be considered as well. In the planned research project, three related, progressive research studies shall investigate how the interaction of auditory and visual information affects people’s decision-making. The studies will examine beach volleyball players in attacking situations as they must process own visual information of the opponent’s position and a supportive call of the team partner apart from the motoric challenge to play the ball. With the newly won insights, decision performances, depending on the processing of multimodal information, can be extensively analysed and evaluated from new perspectives not only in sports, but also in everyday situations in future. By combining the expertise of both cooperation partners from Germany and England in cognitive science, the development of methods to analyse the underlying mechanisms of decision performances as well as the direct benefit receipt to beach volleyball should finally evaluate the success of the project.

• DFG Programme: Research Fellowships
• International Connection: United Kingdom
• Host: Dr. Nicholas Smeeton