Enhancing decision-making during sports performance: Current understanding and future directions

Abstract

Making decisions is a fundamental requirement for effective sports performance. As a result, an understanding of the processes underpinning the generation of these decisions is crucial to researchers and applied practitioners alike. However, while there is much research that explores decision making from a number of different perspectives in sport there are still significant gaps in our knowledge and understanding of the mechanisms and processes involved. There is an increasing body of literature that seeks to understand decision-making from a number of perspectives including classical decision-making, naturalistic, ecological, and intuitive approaches to decision-making. Often this understanding has been developed in isolation, and as a result has failed to coherently impact upon applied practice. This review seeks to clarify current understanding by exploring a number of current views on decision-making in sport and related applied interventions. Areas requiring further research are discussed.