Citation

Plessner H, Schweizer G, Brand R, O'Hare D. Prog. Brain Res. 2009; 174: 151-158.

Affiliation

Institute of Psychology 1, University of Leipzig, Leipzig, Germany. plessner@uni-leipzig.de

Copyright

(Copyright © 2009, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/S0079-6123(09)01313-2

PMID

19477337

Abstract

A significant proportion of all referee decisions during a soccer match are about fouls and misconduct. We argue that most of these decisions can be considered as a perceptual-categorization task in which the referee has to categorize a set of features into two discrete classes (foul/no-foul). Due to the dynamic nature of tackling situations in football, these features share a probabilistic rather that a deterministic relationship with the decision criteria. Accordingly, these processes can be studied on the basis of a multiple-cue learning framework as proposed by Brunswick (1955), which focuses among others on how people learn from repeated exposure to probabilistic information. Such learning processes have been studied on a wide range of tasks, but until now not (to our knowledge) in the area of judging sport performance. We suggest that decision accuracy of referees can be improved by creating a learning environment that fits the requirements of this theoretical perspective.

Language: en