Examining the effect of task constraints on the emergence of creative action in young elite football players by using a method combining expert judgement and frequency count

In adult football, small-sided games are associated with increased action variability and suggested to promote more creative actions compared to regular 11v11 formats. This aligns with predictions from an ecological approach to perception and action that creative actions emerge in environments that grant variability in action, instead of being an expression of the individual player’s ability to generate ideas. To further evidence for this prediction, the current study aimed to expand this observation to elite youth football players. To this end, the number of different and creative actions in 4v4 small-sided game and a 11v11 regular-sided game among 10- to 12-year-old elite football players were examined. We analyzed a total of 7922 actions, which were categorized for type and creativity. Based on a subset of these actions, a panel of elite football coaches judged action types occurring below 0.5% as significantly more creative than more frequent action types. Hence, we used an occurrence of 0.5% as threshold to distinguish creative actions from non-creative actions. The results showed that the total number of actions, the number of different action types, the number creative actions and the number of different creative action types was significantly higher for the small-sided game format than the regular-sided game. In conclusion, this study confirms that in elite youth football, small-sided games induce a more variable and creative action repertoire. This shows that practitioners can design learning environments that promote the emergence of creative actions.     

Cooperation in Mixed‐Motive Games: The Role of Individual Differences in Selfish and Social Orientation

In mixed‐motive games, people must choose between acting upon selfish interests and concerns for others. Yet, the consistency of people's behaviour across these various games is still unclear. If the same conflict between self and others is at the core of all mixed‐motive situations, three hypotheses can be stated: (1) behaviours in different mixed‐motive games should be substantially related; (2) all these games should substantially appeal to dispositional variables that probe in the psychological conflict between self and others; and (3) these dispositional variables should explain the shared variance among various games. These hypotheses were tested among undergraduate students (N = 219) who played seven different single‐shot mixed‐motive games and one sequential game. Social Value Orientation and the ideological attitudes Social Dominance Orientation and Right‐Wing Authoritarianism were included as dispositions. Our findings, however, showed evidence that did not fully substantiate our hypotheses, which calls into question the general idea that all mixed‐motive games render the conflict between selfish interests and concern for others salient. In the discussion, we focus on implications for research on mixed‐motive situations and elaborate on the role of ideology in this domain. Copyright © 2015 European Association of Personality Psychology     

Age-related effects of practice experience on collective behaviours of football players in small-sided games

The purpose of this study was to examine whether offensive and defensive collective behaviours emerging in six-a-side football games (GK+5 vs. 5+GK) varied according to age-related practice experience of young, male players (U16, U17 and U19 yrs). Players’ were not instructed to implement specific tactical plans and their movement trajectories (2D analyses) were recorded using 10 GPS units. Four common measures of team dispersion investigated in previous research (surface area, stretch index, length and width of a team) were used to analyse team performance behaviours. After recording these collective variables, we used sample entropy (SampEn) and cross-sample entropy (Cross-SampEn) measures to assess the regularity and synchronization of participant actions in teams. Results demonstrated clear age-related variations in effects on the collective performance measures analysed. In attacking phases, older and more experienced players occupied a greater surface area and displayed higher values of team width and stretch index. In defensive phases, significant differences were observed in team length and stretch index. Cross-SampEn analysis demonstrated a greater synchronization between offensive and defensive surface areas and team width in older age groups (U17 and U19 yrs). Data suggest how coaches can manipulate practice task constraints to enhance development of team tactical performance behaviours in developing footballers between 16 and 19 yrs of age.     

Eye Movements in Strategic Choice

In risky and other multiattribute choices, the process of choosing is well described by random walk or drift diffusion models in which evidence is accumulated over time to threshold. In strategic choices, level‐k and cognitive hierarchy models have been offered as accounts of the choice process, in which people simulate the choice processes of their opponents or partners. We recorded the eye movements in 2 × 2 symmetric games including dominance‐solvable games like prisoner's dilemma and asymmetric coordination games like stag hunt and hawk–dove. The evidence was most consistent with the accumulation of payoff differences over time: we found longer duration choices with more fixations when payoffs differences were more finely balanced, an emerging bias to gaze more at the payoffs for the action ultimately chosen, and that a simple count of transitions between payoffs—whether or not the comparison is strategically informative—was strongly associated with the final choice. The accumulator models do account for these strategic choice process measures, but the level‐k and cognitive hierarchy models do not. © 2015 The Authors. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.     

儿童公平行为的发展——来自博弈实验的证据

公平正义一直是人类不懈追求的目标,是心理学、经济学等多个学科共同关注的一个重要课题。发展心理学常采用故事法对儿童的公平认知进行研究,博弈范式的引入则为研究儿童的公平行为提供了新的方法和角度。该文主要介绍了独裁者博弈和最后通牒博弈中儿童公平行为的发展趋势,并对已有的矛盾性结论进行了原因分析,探讨了公平行为的内团体偏差效应、公平的本质是意图公平还是结果公平、以及心理理论与公平行为的关系等问题。最后,该文指出今后对儿童公平行为的研究应充分考虑社会情境与社会认知能力的影响。     

Violent video games exposure and aggression: The role of moral disengagement,anger, hostility,and disinhibition

Based on the General Aggression Model (GAM), the current study investigated the interactive effect of personal factors (e.g., sensation-seeking) and situational factors (e.g., violent video games exposure [VVGE]) on the trait aggressive behavior, and the mediating role of individual difference trait (e.g., moral disengagement, anger, and hostility). We recruited 547 undergraduates (48.45% male) from five Chinese universities. The results showed that VVGE was positively associated with moral disengagement, disinhibition, and the four aggressive traits (physical aggression, verbal aggression, anger, and hostility), which were positively associated with each other. Moral disengagement was positively associated with both the disinhibition and the four aggressive traits. Disinhibition was positively associated with the four aggressive traits as well. When controlled for gender, moral disengagement, anger, and hostility wholly mediated the relationship between VVGE and aggression, but the moderation effect of disinhibition was not significant. These findings support the framework of GAM and indicate that moral disengagement, anger, and hostility may be the factors that increase the risk of a higher level of aggression following repeated exposure to violent video games.     

An artificial opposition between grammaticality and frequency: comment on

In a recent Cognition paper (Cognition 85 (2002) B21), Bornkessel, Schlesewsky, and Friederici report ERP data that they claim “show that online processing difficulties induced by word order variations in German cannot be attributed to the relative infrequency of the constructions in question, but rather appear to reflect the application of grammatical principles during parsing” (p. B21). In this commentary we demonstrate that the posited contrast between grammatical principles and construction (in)frequency as sources of parsing problems is artificial because it is based on factually incorrect assumptions about the grammar of German and on inaccurate corpus frequency data concerning the German constructions involved.     

暴力视频游戏对个体亲社会性的影响：一项元分析

暴力视频游戏是一种新兴的娱乐媒介, 是指含有描绘个体试图对其他个体造成伤害等内容的视频游戏。亲社会性是人类区别于动物的重要特征, 包括在人际交往中个体所表现出的利他、助人等一切使他人受益的认知、情感和行为。本文采用元分析的方法整合国内外已有研究, 分析暴力视频游戏对玩家亲社会性影响的主效应, 并重点考察各调节变量在暴力视频游戏与亲社会性的关系中产生的作用。通过文献检索, 纳入符合要求的文献24篇, 包含63个效应值(effect size), 总样本量18554人。研究结果显示：暴力视频游戏与亲社会性总效应值显著, 但相关较弱(r = -0.10)。调节效应分析表明, 暴力视频游戏与亲社会性的关系受到被试性别、被试类型、被试年龄、测量类型与亲社会性测量指标的调节。未来研究可以进一步采用一般攻击模型与一般学习模型等理论模型指导暴力视频游戏对亲社会行为影响研究, 同时优化实证研究中测量亲社会性的实验范式, 并且需要重点考察个体差异对暴力视频游戏与亲社会性关系的影响。     

E-sports are Not Sports

The conclusion of this paper will be that e-sports are not sports. I begin by offering a stipulation and a definition. I stipulate that what I have in mind, when thinking about the concept of sport, is ‘Olympic’ sport. And I define an Olympic Sport as an institutionalised, rule-governed contest of human physical skill. The justification for the stipulation lies partly in that it is uncontroversial. Whatever else people might think of as sport, no-one denies that Olympic Sport is sport. This seeks to ensure that those who might wish to dispute my conclusion might stay with the argument at least for as long as possible. Secondly, the justification for the stipulation lies partly in its normativity—I have chosen an Olympic conception of sport just because it seems to me to offer some kind of desirable version of what sport is and might become. Thirdly, I give examples which show how prominent promoters of e-sports agree with my stipulation, as evidenced by their strenuous attempts to comply with it in order to join the Olympic club. The justification for the definition lies in the conceptual analysis offered—an ‘exhibition-analysis’ which clarifies the concept of sport by offering ‘construals’ of the six first-level terms. The conclusion is that e-sports are not sports because they are inadequately ‘human’; they lack direct physicality; they fail to employ decisive whole-body control and whole-body skills, and cannot contribute to the development of the whole human; and because their patterns of creation, production, ownership and promotion place serious constraints on the emergence of the kind of stable and persisting institutions characteristic of sports governance. Competitive computer games do not qualify as sports, no matter what ‘resemblances’ may be claimed. Computer games are just that—games.