Analysis of the cognitive process through Eye movement among badminton players of different levels

Abstract

Badminton is a game well known for its speed, deception and making adjustments to the situation. This game requires many psychological abilities out of which decision making is must. Experts are the group of players who performed excellence out from their group with achieving good results. Decision making abilities is closely related to the level of players and it is one of the core components in achieving the high performance in sports. This decision making are largely affect by the amount of attention a players put during the game apart from level of game, match or tournament. The visual attention of the players does a significant role in the decision making process in the game of badminton. Here comes the style of visual attention vary from expert to non-expert. The purpose of the study was to analyze the cognitive process through eye movement among badminton players of different levels. The study was conducted on randomly selected male badminton players of senior (N=8), junior (N=8) and sub-junior (N=12), who participated nation badminton competitions in their respective age group from different parts of India. The players were tested on the skill forehand overhead clear, forehand drop, drive and forehand smash. The visual attention and visual fixation were measured with the help of Tobii-Pro Glasses 2 while hitting 20 shuttles each in the skills where the shuttles were randomly feed from two feeders from the other side of the court. To address this research question the data was analyzed in quantitative and qualitative form. Descriptive statistics, multivariate, univariate and pairwise comparison were used to analyzed the quantitative data at 0.05 level of significance, heat map and gaze plot were used to analyzed the qualitative data.