Andrew Mark Williams

University of Utah | UOU · Department of Health, Kinesiology and Recreation

Walking in daily life requires humans to adapt to environments that can influence fear of falling and anxiety about a potential fall. In such environments, individuals may adopt compensatory locomotor and balance changes to maintain a constant expected risk function equal to the product of the probability of some event (e.g., a fall) and the cost o...

There is limited research on female football players, especially related to their physical and cognitive performance under different climactic conditions. We analyzed the impact of a hot environmental temperature on physical performance and anticipation in elite female football players during a fatigue‐inducing intermittent protocol. Elite female p...

Purpose Although spurts in physical capacities during adolescence are well-known, little is known about the existence of such spurts in sport-specific skill development, especially during the period of rapid growth in stature. Our aims were to examine the timing, intensity, and sequence of basketball-specific skill spurts aligned with biological [y...

We evaluated the effects of engaging in extemporaneous speech in healthy young adults while they walked in a virtual environment meant to elicit low or high levels of mobility-related anxiety. We expected that mobility-related anxiety imposed by a simulated balance threat (i.e., virtual elevation) would impair walking behavior and lead to greater d...

Skilled anticipation is underpinned by the ability to synthesise high- (e.g., context) and low-level (e.g., biological motion) processes. While researchers have highlighted the effect of physiological load on the pick-up of biological motion from an opponent’s kinematics, how such stress affects the use of contextual information has remained unexpl...

We evaluated the effects of engaging in extemporaneous speech while walking in virtual environments meant to elicit low or high levels of mobility-related anxiety. We expected that mobility-related anxiety imposed by a simulated balance threat (i.e. virtual high elevation) would impair walking behavior and lead to greater dual-task costs. Altogethe...

We revisit an agenda that was outlined in a previous paper in this journal focusing on the importance of skill acquisition research in enhancing practice and instruction in sport. In this current narrative review, we reflect on progress made since our original attempt to highlight several potential myths that appeared to exist in coaching, implying...

Global and local biological motion processing are likely influenced by an observer’s perceptual experience. Skilled athletes anticipating an opponent’s movements use globally distributed motion information, while less skilled athletes focus on single kinematic cues. Published reports have demonstrated that attention can be primed globally or locall...

In the last few decades, US intelligence organizations have contended with numerous threats, including rapid expansion in technology and communication, global influences on best training and operational practices, and challenges in selecting, retaining, and optimally developing expert operators. Likewise, other domains such as sport and military co...

Introduction We examined skilled-based differences in the impact of exposure to an opponent with action tendencies that were either independent of, dependent on, or both independent of and dependent on evolving environmental information during anticipation. Methods A video-based two-vs.-two soccer task was employed, where 14 expert and 14 novice s...

Older adults who report a fear of falling are more likely to subsequently fall, yet, some gait anxiety-related alterations may protect balance. We examined the effect of age on walking in anxiety-inducing virtual reality (VR) settings. We predicted a high elevation-related postural threat would impair gait in older age, and differences in cognitive...

The ability to respond quickly and accurately to spatial cues is of great importance to performance on any task where quick decision-making is required. The two main effects of spatial attention are priming, when a response to a target is facilitated after being cued at the same location, and inhibition of return (IOR), when the response to the tar...

Contextual interference is an established phenomenon in learning research; random practice schedules are associated with poorer performance, but superior learning, compared with blocked practice schedules. We present a secondary analysis of N = 84 healthy young adults, replicating the contextual interference effect in a time estimation task. We use...

Practice is one of the most important predictors of skill. To become an expert, performers must engage in practice for a prolonged time to develop the psychological characteristics necessary for outstanding performance. Deliberate practice (DP), that is focused repetitive activities with corrective feedback, is particularly beneficial for skill dev...

We examined skill-based differences in the detection and utilization of contextual information over a period of increasing exposure to an opponent’s action preferences in soccer. Moreover, we investigated the ability of athletes to adapt to changes in these action preferences over time. In an initial detection phase, the attacking opponent demonstr...

The development of perceptual-cognitive skills enhances the ability to identify and process environmental information in order to select and execute the most appropriate actions. These skills are influenced by different interrelated constraints during in situ tasks, which are inherent to specific competitive demands such as the mental-physical work...

We examined the effect of physiological workload on gaze behaviour during defensive performance in 2 vs. 1 +goalkeeper game situations in football. Twenty-two players were assigned to either a high- or low-performing group based on a validated measure of tactical performance. A total of 12 game sequences (trials) were presented under high- and low-...

Virtual reality (VR) is a promising and cost-effective tool that has the potential to reduce the prevalence of falls and locomotor impairments in older adults. However, we believe that existing VR-based approaches to prevent falls do not mimic the full breadth of perceptual, cognitive, and motor demands that older adults encounter in daily life. Re...

Although the learning benefits of interleaved practice schedules relative to blocked schedules are well-reported, the mechanisms underlying these effects are not fully understood. Researchers have generally suggested that random schedules of practice increase task-related information processing which arises due to switching between variations of th...

Humans vary considerably in their ability to perform and learn new motor skills. In addition, they respond to different performance and practice conditions in varying ways. Historically, experimental psychologists have characterized these differences as ‘experimental noise’, yet for those who embrace differential psychology, the study of individual...

We explore developmental pathways to excellence in sub-elite adolescent alpine ski racing by exploring athletes' engagement in practice activities that characterize sport specialization and/or diversification. Moreover, we extend previous research by using more refined linear mixed-effects models to examine changes in practice and performance data...

Perception-action coupling is fundamental to effective motor behaviour in complex sports such as gymnastics. We examined the gaze and motor behaviours of 10 international level gymnasts when performing two skills on the mini-trampoline that matched the performance demands of elite competition. The presence and absence of a vaulting table in each sk...

There are advantages in using inertial measurement unit systems (IMUS) for biomechanical analysis when compared to 2D/3D video-based analysis. The main advantage is the ability to analyze movement in the natural performance environment, preserving the ecological validity of the task. Coaches can access accurate and detailed data in real time and us...

Background Healthy young adults typically exhibit a progressive ‘top-down’ reorientation of body segments (i.e., head, trunk, then pelvis) during turning. This behaviour is less evident in older adults at risk of falling, who often reduce angular displacement between body segments during turns. The potential functional and psychological contributor...

Purpose: Published reports suggest that nonoptimal visual search behavior is associated with false negatives in chest x-ray interpretation. Eye movement modeling example (EMME)-based training interventions, that is, interventions showing models of visual search to trainees, have been shown to improve visual search as well as task accuracy. Approach...

Geographical regions possess distinct sporting cultures that can influence athletic development from a young age. The United States (US) and Austria both produce elite alpine ski racers, yet have distinct sport structures (i.e., funding, skiing prominence). In this exploratory study, we investigated sport outcomes and psychological profiles in adol...

We examined the interaction between explicit contextual priors and kinematic information during anticipation in soccer. We employed a video-based anticipation task where skilled soccer players had to predict the direction of the imminent actions of an attacking opponent in possession of the ball. The players performed the task both with and without...

Expert performance across a range of domains is underpinned by superior perceptual-cognitive skills. Over the last five decades, researchers have provided evidence that experts can identify and interpret opponent kinematics more effectively than their less experienced counterparts. More recently, researchers have demonstrated that experts also use...

In sports such as baseball, cricket, or tennis, skilled performers can strike fast moving objects with extremely high levels of accuracy. The ability to anticipate the outcome of an event, prior to the act itself, is crucial to superior performance. Published reports have identified several sources of information that skilled performers use to deve...

Anxiogenic settings lead to reduced postural sway while standing, but anxiety-related balance may be influenced by the location of postural threat in the environment. We predicted that the direction of threat would elicit a parallel controlled manifold relative to the standing surface, and an orthogonal uncontrolled manifold during standing. Altoge...

In an effort to evaluate the mechanisms underpinning performance in alpine ski racing, researchers have focused on the predictive validity of measures derived from fitness assessments. However, a limitation of this literature is the absence of practice time, since prolonged training may naturally develop specific fitness capacities, making some tes...

The use of technology has been proposed to improve decision-making in sport officials. The implementation of the video Assistant Referee (VAR) in association football is one example of how technology can be used to assist decision making, although its impact remains unknown. In 2195 competitive football matches across 13 countries, the VAR conducte...

We study the developmental and professional activities engaged in by 86 female adult soccer players from the senior national teams of Australia, Canada, England, Sweden, and the United States of America. Players completed the Participation History Questionnaire (PHQ) to elicit the amount and type of activities engaged in across their developmental...

At the turn of the millennium, a review paper was published in this journal on talent identification and development in soccer (Williams & Reilly, 2000). In the current paper, we assess progress made in this field over the last twenty years relative to the areas for future research highlighted in the original review. We evaluate developments in lig...

We examined the informational value of biological motion from the arm in predicting the location of a thrown ball. In three experiments, participants were classified as being skilled and less skilled based on their actual performance on the task (i.e., using a within-task criterion). We then presented participants with a range of stick figure repre...

The authors used a quasi-experimental design to examine the efficacy of a cognitive-behavioral-therapy (CBT) intervention for enhancing psychological well-being (positive and negative affect, vitality, self-esteem), rehabilitation adherence, and clinical rehabilitation outcomes (pain, physical function) in 16 NCAA (National Collegiate Athletics Ass...

In radiology, 60% to 80% of diagnostic errors are perceptual. The use of more efficient visual search behaviors is expected to reduce these errors. We collected eye-tracking data from participants with different levels of experience when interpreting chest X-rays during the completion of a pathology-detection task. Eye-tracking measures were assess...

A substantial number of medical errors in radiology are attributed to failures of perception or decision making, although it is believed that experience (or expertise) might buffer diagnosticians from some types of perceptual-cognitive bias. We examined how the quality of contextual information influences decision making and how underlying perceptu...

There is limited knowledge about the impact of task load on experts’ integration of contextual priors and visual information during dynamic and rapidly evolving anticipation tasks. We examined how experts integrate contextual priors––specifically, prior information regarding an opponent's action tendencies––with visual information such as movement...

The fear of falling, or mobility-related anxiety, profoundly affects gait, but is challenging to study without risk to participants. Purpose: To determine the efficacy of using virtual reality (VR) to manipulate illusions of height and consequently, elevated mobility-related anxiety when turning. Moreover, we examined if mobility-related anxiety...

Anticipation is the ability to accurately predict future actions or events ahead of the act itself. When attempting to anticipate, researchers have identified that at least two broad sources of information are used: contextual information relating to the situation in question; and biological motion from postural cues. However, the neural correlates...

We examined positive youth development within a high performance sport environment. Youth football players (N = 455; Males = 315; Females = 140) completed a range of questionnaires including: the Youth Experiences Survey for Sport; Self-Confidence subscale of the Competitive State Anxiety Inventory-2 Revised; Sport Competence Inventory; Prosocial a...

Deliberate practice is defined as an activity that is highly relevant to improving performance. It is effortful, challenging, not inherently enjoyable, or immediately rewarding and underpinned by advanced cognitive processing. The authors examine the effect of increasing cognitive processing during deliberate practice on skill learning in intermedi...

Perceptual-cognitive skills enable an individual to integrate environmental information with existing knowledge to be able to process stimuli and execute appropriate responses on complex tasks. Various underlying processes could explain how perceptual-cognitive skills impact on expert performance, as articulated in three theoretical accounts: (a) t...

Objectives We examined the impact of judgement utility on the use of explicit contextual priors and visual information during action anticipation in soccer. Design We employed a repeated measures design, in which expert soccer players had to perform a video-based anticipation task under various conditions. Methods The task required the players to...

Over the last decade, research on the visual focus of attention has become increasingly popular in psychological science. The focus of attention has been shown to be important in fast team-sport games. The authors developed a method that measures the extent of the attentional focus and perceptual capabilities during performance of a sport-specific...

Inequalities in relative age distribution have previously been demonstrated to influence participation and performance achievements in Masters athletes. The purpose of the present study was to examine the participation- and performance-related constituent year effect among Masters athletes (n = 2474) from the European Masters Track and Field Champi...

Anticipation is the ability to accurately predict the outcome of an opponent’s actions ahead of the act itself. This ability relies on at least two sources of information: kinematic and contextual information (Runswick et al., 2018). No data exists to demonstrate how neural activity supports the use of these two information sources. We recorded the...

Purpose: Our aim was to determine if self-determined motivation (SDM) in elite, men’s soccer changes over time and differs as a function of age, skill-grouping, and engagement in soccer play and practice. We tested predictions from the Developmental Model of Sport Participation (DMSP) regarding relations between practice and play and SDM among both...

Skilled anticipation is underpinned by the use of kinematic and contextual information. However, few researchers have examined what happens when contextual information suggests an outcome that is different from the event that follows. We aimed to bridge this gap by manipulating the relationship between contextual information and final ball location...

Anticipation is the ability to accurately predict the outcome of an opponent’s actions ahead of the act itself. In cricket, recent studies reported that experts are able to use two sources of information: low-level kinematic cues from the bowler but also high-level contextual information related to the event (Runswick et al., 2018). This study aims...

Objectives: Our aim was to assess the developmental activities that best define elite players in female soccer in one of the top nations for female soccer in the world. In addition to measurement of career practice hours in soccer and other sports, we quantified hours engaged in activities judged high in challenge. Design and Methods: Adult Nationa...

The capacity to perceive color in the peripheral field has attracted research interest for more than a decade. There is evidence that sensitivity to red-green color variations is lower than for yellow-blue in peripheral vision. Whether, and to what extent, color vision affects the visual focus of attention, which is normally much smaller than the v...

...Since the times and works of William Sealy Gosset (1876–1937) and Ronald Aylmer Fisher (1890–1962), imperfections of conventional null-hypothesis significance testing and in particular, use of P-values to evaluate such testing (invariably referred to as inferential statistics), have been well recognised (Wasserstein & Lazar, 2016 Wasserstein, R....

The ability to anticipate what will happen next is critical to performance in many sports as well as other professional domains. We review progress made in our scientific understanding of this topic since the seminal work conducted some 50 years ago. We highlight advances in methods and measures and identify the different perceptual-cognitive skill...

Objectives: To determine the option generation strategies used by expert and novice tennis players when anticipating an opponent's intentions using information that would normally be picked up sequentially prior to the opponent striking the ball. Design and method: Altogether, 12 expert and 14 novice tennis players completed an option generation ta...

Skilled anticipation is underpinned by the use of kinematic and contextual information. However, few researchers have examined what happens when contextual information suggests an outcome that is different from the event that occurs. We predicted that when contextual information is congruent with the eventual outcome then anticipation would be faci...

Anticipation is the ability to accurately predict the outcome of an opponent’s actions ahead of the act itself. This ability relies on at least two broad sources of information, namely low-level kinematic information from the postural orientation of opponents and high-level contextual information related to the event. No data exist to demonstrate h...

When performing actions under severe time pressure, the ability to accurately anticipate is vital to performance. Skilled anticipation is underpinned by the use of both kinematic cues and contextual information. However, there have been few published reports examining how, and when, these two sources interact during anticipation. In this study, 18...

The understanding of how experts integrate prior situation-specific information (i.e., contextual priors ) with emergent visual information when performing dynamic and temporally constrained tasks is limited. We used a soccer-based anticipation task to examine the ability of expert and novice players to integrate prior information about an opponent...

We examined the effects of anxiety and situation-specific contextual information on attentional, interpretational, and behavioural processes underpinning perceptual–motor performance as proposed by Nieuwenhuys and Oudejans (2012) using an in situ task. Twelve skilled cricket batsmen played against a skilled spin bowler under conditions manipulated...

Objectives: When performing actions under severe time pressure, the ability to anticipate is vital to performance. Skilled anticipation is underpinned by the use of both kinematic cues and contextual information, yet there have been few published reports examining how, and when, these two sources interact during anticipation. Design: This study em...