Anticipatory representation of visual basketball scenes by novice and expert players

This paper studies the anticipatory nature of perception in relation to subjects' expertise in basketball. The two experiments conducted showed that experts encode game situations by automatically building a representation of the next‐likely state of the observed scene. In Experiment 1, subjects had to quickly compare pairs of configurations presented in succession. The results indicated that expert subjects differentiated the second configuration from the first less accurately and more slowly when the second configuration was the next‐likely state of the first, than when it was a possible previous state. In Experiment 2, subjects had to study game configurations and then perform a recognition task. The results showed that experts more often falsely recognized new configurations when they were the next‐likely state of an already‐encoded configuration than when they represented a possible previous state. Based on these results, we discuss the nature of expert knowledge, the integration of anticipatory components in perceptual processes, and the impact of expert knowledge on visual‐scene encoding and memorization.