A field of psychology that is concerned with the scientific
investigation of cognitive (from the Latin, cognoscere—“
to know”) processes or mental activities
(e.g., thinking, mental imagery) in sport performers
(Moran, 2009). Research in cognitive sport psychology
has been influenced by theoretical developments in
cognitive psychology, a discipline that explores how
the mind works in acquiring, storing and using knowledge.
Two main cognitive paradigms or theoretical frameworks may be identified—the classical approach
and the embodiment approach. According to the classical
cognitive paradigm (Lachman, Lachman, &
Butterfield, 1979), the mind is an abstract representational
system or thinking machine. It does not store
knowledge or experience directly but, instead, creates
“mental representations” (hypothetical internal structures
such as concepts or mental images that contain
knowledge about the world) of these phenomena.
Therefore, ‘thinking,’ or using knowledge and imagination
to go beyond the obvious, involves manipulation
of one’s mental representations of the external
world—a process that can be measured using the
speed and accuracy with which people respond to cognitive
tasks. Influenced by this paradigm, sport psychology
researchers have identified a number of
cognitive differences between expert and novice athletes
(Baker & Farrow, 2015). For example, expert
athletes tend to be superior to novices in encoding and
recalling meaningful patterns of play from actual competitive
situations. By contrast with the classical paradigm,
embodiment researchers postulate that human
cognition is shaped by bodily processes and environmental
factors. Specifically, they claim that cognitive
processes are inherently embodied because they are
simulations or reenactments of sensory-motor experience.
Embodiment theorists argue that, when applied
to sport, an athlete’s level of expertise may affect his
or her perception. Specifically, balls should be perceived
as appearing larger and moving slower as the
expertise level of the perceiver increases—because
balls are more “hittable” at higher levels of the athlete’s
ability. This hypothesis has found some degree
of empirical support (Gray, 2014). In summary, classical
and embodied paradigms offer fertile theoretical
possibilities for the study of cognitive processes in
sport.
