| Sumario: | We investigated the influence of providing football goalkeepers with kicker's prior preferences on anticipation and gaze behaviour to explore the interaction of top-down and bottom-up cognitive processing. Forty participants (20 experienced goalkeepers and 20 novices) were asked to anticipate the direction of penalty kicks in three experimental conditions: without information (control situation), with correct information (congruent condition), and with wrong information (incongruent condition) on a kicker's prior preferences. An eye-tracking device was used to analyse fixations on areas of interest. The participants anticipated the direction of the kick in congruent situations better than in the other two conditions (p = 0.001). Experienced goalkeepers were superior to novices in the incongruent and control conditions (p = 0.001). In those conditions, experienced goalkeepers also fixated more (p = 0.025) and longer (p = 0.046) on the trunk, and longer on the hips (p = 0.036), non-kicking leg (p = 0.001), and kicking leg (p = 0.001). We conclude that providing congruent information on a kicker's preferences positively impacts goalkeepers' anticipation. This confirms a model that expertise differences between experienced goalkeepers and novices are more prominent when the interaction of bottom-up and top-down processes is difficult.
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