Affordance Perception in Athletes using VR  PhD Project

My research focuses on how athletes perceive their affordances (action capabilities), within their highly dynamic sporting environments. In these settings, the actions available to an athlete continuously evolve as the game itself does. Research has shown that athletes are able to perceive the changing affordances of themselves and others, including teammates and opponents, enabling them to perform complex actions successfully while avoiding undesirable outcomes. One such complex action, pivotal across many sports, is interception: the act of stopping an object from continuing along it's trajectory. While interceptive actions have been thoroughly explored in striking sports such as cricket and baseball, they remain understudied in invasion sports like football and basketball. My research aims to bridge this gap by examining how athletes perceive their affordances for interception when faced with competitive opponents during invasion sports. I will investigate how various factors, including target speed, opponent characteristics, and situational context, influence athletes’ perception of their interceptive affordances. To achieve this, I will be combining virtual reality and eye-tracking technology, while conducting real-life small-scale experiments, and video analysis of professional gameplay. Ultimately, my goal is to shed light on the mechanisms behind rapid split-second interceptive decision-making, offering insights to improve on-field performance and give athletes a competitive edge over their rivals.