| （英） |
In ball sports with goalkeepers (GKs) such as soccer and handball, their saving ability plays a crucial role in determining match outcomes, especially during penalty kick (PK) in soccer and penalty throw (PT) in handball. In the scene of PT in handball, a shooter is only seven meters away from a goal, therefore a GK must predict the shooting direction quickly and begin his movement before the ball is released from the shooter. The GKs’ predictions rely on visual information, and differences in prediction accuracy among individuals stem from both the visual reception and processing. Particularly, it is important to understand how a GK observes the shooter’s movements, and the eye movements patterns can be one of the indicators.
In a past research (Loffting et al., 2015), the eye movements of professional and novice GKs were compared, revealing differences in the number of saccades. However, this study only focused on the number of saccades and did not examine other aspects of eye movements characteristics. This study aims to explore and clarify eye movement characteristics that affect prediction accuracy by focusing on multiple factors including the amplitude of eye movements. In our experiment, five professional GKs and five novice GKs predicted the shooting direction after watching PT videos from a GK’s view, and binocular eye movements were measured by the eye-tracking system during the task. Results showed that the course prediction accuracy of professional GKs tend to be higher than that of novice GKs. Furthermore, subjects with higher accuracy exhibited shorter saccade amplitudes. These findings suggest that prediction accuracy is related to the characteristics of visual reception such as the amplitude of eye movements. |