Author(s): KELLY, J., CINELLI, M.E., Institution: WILFRID LAURIER UNIVERSITY, Country: CANADA, Abstract-ID: 327

INTRODUCTION:
An essential component of individual and team success in basketball is decision-making
ability. Critically, basketball coaches require reliable and valid tools to assess this skill to aid
their talent evaluation processes. To address previous challenges in examining decision-making,
the current study aimed to create a laboratory-based perceptual task that could serve as a proxy
for in-game decision-making ability.
METHODS:
Grounded in ecological psychology, the perceptual task
allowed participants to perceive and act upon collision and aperture affordances in a virtual
reality environment. The study sample included Canadian university basketball players and non
sport-playing Canadian university students (x̄ = 21.14 years ± 2.43; 17 athletes and 19 non
athletes).
RESULTS:
Two separate two-way mixed ANOVAs revealed that basketball players were more
accurate (F(1, 34) = 4.327, p = 0.045, ω² = 0.052) and more consistent (F(1, 34) = 7.695, p =
0.009, ω² = 0.156) than non-athletes on the perceptual task. Correlational analyses suggested that
consistent performance on perceptual task was moderately associated with higher assists (r(14) =
0.41 [-0.11, 0.75], p = 0.119), higher turnovers (r(15) = 0.42 [0.05, 0.79], p = 0.093), and higher
box creation scores ((r(15) = 0.47 [0.10, 0.78], p = 0.060)
CONCLUSION:
Overall, the current study lays the
foundation for a more holistic testing of athletes and challenges traditional approaches to
evaluating decision-making. Future iterations of the perceptual task could prove useful for talent
identification and investigations of decision-making ability in basketball players.