Situation awareness in sports science: Beyond the cognitive paradigm | [Situacijska svijest u sportskoj nauci: Van kognitivne paradigme]

n sports, the awareness that cognitive-perceptual abilities, such as anticipation, decision-making, and awareness of the situation are prerequisites for excellent performance is increasingly spread. Experienced athletes develop, as a result of a long practice, sophisticated task-specific knowledge structures that enable them to deal with situations more effectively and efficiently than others. Elite athletes, for example, selectively perform a visual scan of the scene, focusing their attention on relevant sources and discarding irrelevant information at the same time. Additionally, experienced athletes are more aware of events that can be probabilistically occurring in a given situation and are able to capture contextual signals that can facilitate predicting future events. These skills act in complementarity with a vast repertoire of strategies and tactics available and with the knowledge of their rapid speediness in a given situation