The role of working memory capacity in soccer tactical decision making at different levels of expertise

Glavaš et al. Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications https://doi.org/10.1186/s41235-023-00473-2 (2023) 8:20 ORIGINAL ARTICLE Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications Open Access The role of working memory capacity in soccer tactical decision making at different levels of expertise Dragan Glavaš1, Mario Pandžić1 and Dražen Domijan2*    Abstract Athletic skills acquired through deliberate practice are essential for expert sports performance. Some authors even suggest that practice circumvents the limits of working memory capacity (WMC) in skill acquisition. However, this circumvention hypothesis has been challenged recently by the evidence that WMC plays an important role in expert performance in complex domains such as arts and sports. Here, we have used two dynamic soccer tactical tasks to explore the effect of WMC on tactical performance at different levels of expertise. As expected, professional soccer players exhibited better tactical performance than amateur and recreational players. Furthermore, WMC predicted faster and more accurate tactical decisions in the task under auditory distraction and faster tactical decisions in the task without distraction. Importantly, lack of expertise × WMC interaction suggests that the WMC effect exists at all levels of expertise. Our results speak against the circumvention hypothesis and support a model of independent contributions of WMC and deliberate practice on expert performance in sports. Keywords Working memory capacity, Expertise, Deliberate practice, Tactical decision making, Soccer Significance statement What are the sources of expertise is one of the central topics in cognitive psychology. In this regard, the important question that remains unresolved is whether working memory capacity contributes to experts’ performance or its limits could be circumvented by many hours of deliberate practice in a specific domain. Here, we examined this question in the context of decision-making in sports. We asked soccer players at different levels of expertise (professional, amateur, and recreational) to judge the next best move for a player shown in a short video clip. The video clips depicted real-life situations routinely encountered by players during a match. The *Correspondence: Dražen Domijan 1 Catholic University of Croatia, Zagreb, Croatia 2 Department of Psychology, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Rijeka, Sveučilišna Avenija 4, 51000 Rijeka, Croatia results provide clear evidence for a unique contribution of working memory capacity to the decision-making performance at all levels of expertise. Such findings support models that assume the existence of a general or domainfree control mechanism with limited capacity whose impact on behavior cannot be overridden by extensive practice in the domain. In other words, our data suggest that working memory capacity and deliberate practice make independent contributions to expert performance in sports. Introduction The view that expert performance is largely, and perhaps even entirely, a reflection of training history has held sway in the scientific literature on expertise for decades (Ericsson et al., 1993). This view was championed by Ericsson and colleagues (Ericsson et al., 1993), who argued that innate "talent", genetically prescribed traits, and characteristics, play little if any direct role in expert performance, except in the case of body size and height © The Author(s) 2023. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Glavaš et al. Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications (2023) 8:20 (Ericsson et al., 2007). This "nurture" view of expert performance is also popular among non-scientists. For example, reflecting on his career, the former basketball superstar Michael Jordan once commented, "I practice as if I am playing the game. So, when the moment comes in the game, it is not new to me. That is the beauty of the game of basketball; that is the reason why you practice; that is the effort. So, when you get to that moment, you do not have to think. Instinctively things happen." A testable prediction that follows from Ericsson and colleagues’ theory has been termed the "circumventionof-limits hypothesis" (Hambrick & Meinz, 2011). According to this hypothesis, through extended deliberate practice "performers can acquire skills that circumvent basic limits of working memory capacity (WMC) and sequential processing" (Ericsson & Charness, 1994, p. 725). In particular, deliberate practice leads to the development of extended or long-term working memory (LTWM) that enables experts to bypass reliance on WMC in the performance of domain-relevant tasks. LT-WM is a domain-specific portion of long-term memory which relies on efficient encoding strategies and retrieval structures that facilitate memory storage and retrieval (Ericsson & Kintsch, 1995). It is thought that LT-WM contributes to the superior performance of expert chess players, as revealed by seminal studies on expertise (Chase & Simon, 1973a, 1973b; de Groot, 1965) and to the superior perceptual-cognitive skills exhibited by experts in many sports (Mann et al., 2007; Williams & Ford, 2008). The circumvention-of-limits hypothesis received support from studies showing diminished or no effect of WMC on expert performance in domain-specific tasks. For example, in the study of Hambrick et al. (2012), visuospatial ability predicted geological bedrock mapping performance at low but not at high levels of geological knowledge. Furthermore, Sohn and Doane (2003) found the LT-WM × WMC interaction revealing a reduced impact of WMC on aviation-situation awareness among more skilled pilots. However, there is also evidence that individual differences in many domains are not just a product of deliberate practice but also depend on cognitive abilities (Hambrick & Meinz, 2011; Hambrick et al., 2014a, 2014b; Macnamara et al., 2014, 2016). Hambrick et al. (2016) emphasized that WMC, or the capacity to control and coordinate processes and storage during the performance of complex cognitive tasks (Miyake & Shah, 1999), is a significant piece of the expertise puzzle because it regulates and maintains (...truncated)