The Effects Of Visual Spatial Working Memory On Basketball Players' Defensive Anticipation

Athletes need to make defensive anticipation through visual search or selective attention in actual sport situations,and previous studies have shown that the visual spatial working memory has significant effect on selective attention in visual search.Therefore,this study will introduce the concept of visual spatial working memory and research methods used in cognitive psychology to explore the influence of visual spatial working memory capacity and its two functional sub-components(object and spatial working memory capacity)on anticipation ability of basketball players.Experiment 1 combining visual spatial working memory with sport anticipation and adopted 3(anticipation task difficulty)× 2(visual spatial working memory capacity)two factors mixed experimental design to explore whether basketball players' anticipation ability in defenseis influenced by visual spatial working memory capacity.The participants were 30 male basketball players from one sport university in China.The results showed that the main effect of visual spatial working memory capacity was significant for the reaction time of anticipation.For the accuracy,the main effect of task difficulty was significant.Experiment 2 consisted of two experiments.Experiment 2a combining object working memory task with sport anticipation task adopted 3(anticipation task difficulty)× 2(object working memory capacity)two factors mixed experimental design to explore whether the defense anticipation of basketball players would be influenced by object working memory.The participants were 30 male basketball players from one sport university in China.The results showed that for the reaction time of anticipation,the main effect of the object working memory capacity was significant.For the accuracy of anticipation,the main effect of task difficulty was significant.Experiment 2b combing the spatial working memory task and anticipation task adopted 3(anticipation task difficulty)× 2(spatial working memory capacity)two factor mixed experimental design to investigate whether the defense anticipation of basketball players would be influenced by spatial working memory capacity.The participants were 30 male basketball players from one sport university in China.The results showed that the main effect of task difficulty and spatial working memory capacity wtih the interaction between task difficulty and spatial working memory capacity were not significant for the reaction time of anticipation.For the accuracy of anticipation,the main effect of difficulty and spatial working memory capacity were significant.Experiment 3 consisted of two experiments.Experiment 3a combing object working memory task and sport anticipationand adopted 2(object working memory load)× 3(anticipation task difficulty)two factor mixed experimental design to investigate the effects of object working memory load on defensive anticipation of basketball players under dual task situation.The participants were 30 male male basketball players from one sport university in China.The results showed that the interaction between task difficulty and object working memory load was significant for anticipation reaction time.For the anticipation accuracy,the main effect of task difficulty and working memory load were significant.Experiment 3b combinig the spatial working memory task and defensive anticipation adopted 2(spatial working memory load)× 3(anticipation task difficulty)two factor mixed experimental design to investigate the effects of spatial working memory load on defensive anticipation of basketball players under dual task situation.The experimental participants were 30 male basketball players from one sport university in China.The results showed that for anticipation reaction time,the main effect of task difficulty was significant.For anticipation accuracy,the main effect of task difficulty and spatial working memory load were significant.The general conclusion from the above three experiments as the followings: the basketball players' defensive anticipation ability is influenced by visual spatial working memory capacity.The lower visual spatial working memory capacity,the faster anticipation speed.,suggesting that depending on the spatial working memory capacity may be related to the amount of information acquired by the visual search.Two functional components of visual spatial working memory-object working memory and spatial working memory plays different roles in basketball players' defensive anticipation.The lower oject working memory capacity,the faster anticipation reaction speed,and the object work memory may have an impact on the visual search phase.The higher spatial working memory capacity,the higher the anticipation accuracy,while space working memory may have an effect on the information processing phase.