Anxiety, Expertise and Gaze Behaviors during Penalty Kick Anticipation in Football Goalkeepers

The effect of pressure condition on sport performance has always been one of the major issues of research and Anxiety’s influence on performance and its underlining mechanisms continues to be one of the main research interests for sport psychologists. The purpose of current study was to examine the effect of state-competitive anxiety on anticipation accuracy and gaze indicators of football goalkeeper with two levels of skill. Two groups of 10 Expert and novice goalkeepers were required to anticipate penalty kicks presented on temporally occluded video in two counterbalanced experimental conditions. During anticipation, gaze behaviors (duration and number of fixations) were recorded using Pupil binocular mobile eye tracker. Gaze information were extracted using add-ons of pupil player software and then anticipation accuracy and gaze data analyzed using Mixed ANOVA and paired t test. Increased anxiety led to decreased processing efficiency (increased number of fixations and decreased duration of fixations) for both skill level groups whereas Anxiety influenced performance efficiency (decreased the accuracy of anticipation) just in novice group, and had no effects on performance in expert goalkeepers. Generally, effects of anxiety in expert group is a support for ACT prediction and showed that anxiety decreased processing efficiency and no effects on performance efficiency. In novice group, Further future research needs to have clear insight