ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Sport Psychology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1682389
This article is part of the Research TopicAdvances in Sports Science: Latest Findings and New Scientific Proposals- Volume IIIView all 20 articles
Research on the visual search behavior and decision-making ability of basketball referees
Provisionally accepted
- 1Shanghai University of Sport, Shanghai, China
- 2Wuhan Business University, Wuhan, China
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(1) Background: in sports, basketball referees have to face high pressure and time constraints, efficient visual search behavior and decision-making particularly important. (2) Methods: this study compared different levels of experience (expert group, n=10; non-expert groups, n=10) examined the visual search behavior and decision-making ability of basketball referees when watching 20 game video clips through eye movement technology. (3) Results: the results showed that, compared with the non-expert group, the expert group had higher decision-making accuracy (P < 0.01), and the percentage of fixations time was longer in the central area (P < 0.01), the outer area (P < 0.01) and the percentage of fixations time in the invalid area (P < 0.05) . However, there were no significant differences in the number of fixations (P=0.904), fixations duration (P=0.363) and entropy (P=0.213) between the expert group and non-experts. (4) Conclusions: our research indicates that there are significant differences in the visual search behaviors of basketball referees with different experiences. These data can provide valuable insights into the visual search patterns of basketball referees in real game environments and emphasize the importance of refereeing expertise for basketball referees.
Keywords: Basketball referee, visual search behavior, decision-making, experience, Referee
Received: 08 Aug 2025; Accepted: 17 Sep 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 王, Chen, Wu and Zhang. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Qi Zhang, zhangqi@sus.edu.cn
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