 Welcome back to the science of cricket series and to anticipation and perceptual motor skill. My name is Dr Oliver Runzwick or Olly and I'm going to talk to you today about how anticipation and perceptual motor skill works in cricket, particularly in cricket batting, but mainly just because that's where all the literature and all the research has been done. So I'm a lecturer in performance psychology at Kings College London and I'm also what we would call a skill acquisition consultant at runzwickperformance.com where I work with the England and Wales Cricket Board to support coaches in the women's game and also to help with measuring and understanding anticipation in the men's game as well. And first of all just a big thanks to Stu for inviting me along to be part of this lecture series and I hope you enjoy what we're going to talk about today. So I'm going to start off just by talking about what we mean by anticipation and perceptual motor skill. I'm going to talk about the importance of considering what information we're using when we're performing these skills and that's really a big part of how we go about understanding training and testing anticipation skill is by understanding what information people are using. Now I'm going to just talk you through step by step and what is actually happening when a delivery is bold from a perceptual motor perspective, what information is being used, how it's being used and how that results in us playing shots. I'll talk a little bit about the things that then affect this process which is ultimately what the bowler is trying to do is affect that process from the batsman. I'll talk a bit about how we test these things and then a bit about how we can train these things. I just wanted to give a shout out the start to a couple papers which are a few years old now which I've taken some inspiration from and lots of the research we talk about in this video has been built on the work of Vishnu, Dave, Sean Muller, Bruce Abernethy and a variety of people have been doing work in this area for a long time. So these are a couple older papers if you're interested in the context around where this research has been coming from and there's most of the things we cover as we go through will be a little bit newer. A lot of the older work focused on the visual element and we'll be talking more about the process as a whole today. So I've put all these definitions on the screen together just so if you're watching the YouTube video you can just easily flip back and see them all on the screen at once. So anticipation there's a lot of different definitions for anticipation. In psychology it's often referred to in terms of looking at emotions and for example getting an emotion based on anticipating an event happening and why when I say anticipating an event happening it's kind of predicting what's going to happen in the future. So what I've put here is the ability to predict an opponent's action intentions in time to facilitate an appropriate response. This is a context specific definition that I just came up with now in order to put together all the different ones you might find in the dictionary and the research to understand that basically we're saying you need to know what an opponent's going to do in time to do something about it in response. So in cricket that would be in batting for example knowing where the ball's going to get pitched what it's going to do off the wicket in order to be able to actually hit it. So it's not necessarily just about predicting the future it's more constant process than just saying I think the ball is going to bowl a full one. We're going to be updating those predictions all the time in order to facilitate the way we're actually responding to it as well. But which brings in the perceptual motor element. So perceptions about becoming aware of objects or relationships or events by using information that comes in through your senses. So the information coming in we might call that vision if it's something that we're seeing perception is what that means to us taking some meaning from it. So seeing a particular wrist angle and a spinner that's one thing to a complete novice that doesn't actually mean anything to them but to me it might mean this is going to be a googly and that's that perceptual process is taking meaning from the information that is coming in. So it's also we've got the motor element we said anticipation and perceptual motor skill. The motor element is actually then producing the movement responses. I put there we don't measure this enough in the from the psychological aspect. You've heard a lot from biomechanists. You've heard some things about injury for example. We don't measure the movement enough from a psychological perspective. We often focus on the vision and perception a little bit too much. But I'm going to show you quite a few papers today which do measure that motor element as well. I've thrown cognition in there too. Some people would say perception and cognition are roughly the same thing where perception is a type of cognition. But I just wanted to throw this in there because it's got the bit about judging, imagining and problem solving. All those definitions there from the American Psychological Association's dictionary about what psychological terms actually mean. But I've thrown those in there because a lot happens in cricket before the ball even gets bobbled and that's what we're going to talk about today as well. So just to give you a bit of an overview, Florian Loffing and Riven Cannell Bruland wrote a short review about where we were in 2017 understanding anticipation in sport. And their highlights in this paper were anticipation and predicting an opponent's action intention is key to successful performance in lots of sports, particularly ones where we're highly time constrained. For example in cricket where if we're facing a fast bowler there is a lot of time constraints in what we can do, same as catching in the field or wicketkeeping as well. But also bowlers, for example in a T20 reacting to movements of batsmen around the crease and being able to anticipate when an opponent's going to ramp you in order to bowl the ball in a different location is exactly the same process. The source of information that allows such predictions include picking up on opponent's movements and on context and I'll tell you a bit about what those two things mean in a second. And then anticipation seems to be governed by factors relating to visual as well as motor expertise. So visual expertise doesn't just mean having good eyesight, it means knowing where to look and also often incorporates some of those perceptual processes making taking meaning from information as well. But also you need to have motor expertise, you can't execute that appropriate response without being able to actually play the shot. And also understanding for example as a batsman how a bowler can bowl and having some expertise the other way around seems to have an impact too and I'll talk a bit about that when we talk about training anticipation skills. And then the interplay between kinematic and textual information has yet to be properly explored and I think since 2017 it's been explored an awful lot more and you'll hear about some of that in this talk as well. So they've outlined these two different sources of information contextual and what in this slide will call current sensory information, some people will just use visual but actually it's not just visual information that is useful. So contextual information just across the board in different sports might mean things like the shots that someone's played before so event sequences it might mean understanding opponents action tendencies and preferences. So an action tendency might be I know this person tends to drop it short or an action preference might be I know this person likes to bowl out swing. So knowing about your opponents none of that is current visual information or current things that we're finding out just from looking at them it's because we something that we know in advance and that's what contextual information is normally referring to. In the dictionary it would be something a definition of something like information in which a certain scenario can be fully understood. So if we're just watching a bowler run in like we often do in the net we're actually missing loads of really really important information. Score related information like the first ball of a test match someone's probably going to try and aim around fourth stump line for example but then also play a positioning we see three slips and two gullies that has a massive influence on what is likely to happen moving forward. So contextual information is stuff that is more constant it's going on often prior to the delivery in cricket because in cricket we can't change anything we can't be moving field as once the bowl is running in we have these kind of more stable sources and contextual information that are there for every delivery there is a score for every delivery there's a field setting for every delivery there's a sequence of deliveries that have gone before even for the first delivery of a match if you know who the bowler is there'll be information for example like the nature of the wicket so there's loads of stuff going on before the delivery and often that is what contextual information is all about and this is more as you can see from the dates more recent work and I'll talk to you about some of my work in this area as well. And then we have sensory information that's also going to contribute to the process of being able to predict where the ball is going to go. So we have the relative motion of different players that's not as relevant in cricket but what is really relevant in cricket is advanced cues so picking up kinematic positions from a bowler for example can tell you a lot of information about where the ball is likely to go and then obviously object motion as well so the ball flight and cricket and actually those early stages of ball flight are really important as well so I just dropped the paper down there in the corner which we'll hear a bit more about later which I wrote last year which puts together a model of the different types of information that I used in striking sports in general which is where these tables are featured as well so I just want to show you a bit of evidence around this idea of the fact that we're using lots of different information to anticipate. So the study you can see on the left was about how skilled cricketers and less skilled or novice players anticipate where a ball is going to go using what we call an occlusion paradigm which means we see some images in this case it was a life size picture up on the wall but not picture life size video up on the wall so it's all to scale you're holding about the bowler runs in and the video then stops just at the point of ball release so we're interested in what's happening before ball flight here it forces you to anticipate then if you're if you're saying I want you now to tell me where the ball was going to go without seeing any ball flight and then tell me a bit about what information you're using to do that then we can start to work out what kind of things are happening before the balls in the air and the key thing that you'll see on this is that if you look here in the graph at the bottom we have the control conditions which basically mean there was no contextual information we just watched the bowler run in said where do you think the ball's going to go and then we have a context condition where we give all the information that you would have in a cricket match for example previous deliveries which is the sequence the field setting and the situation of the game and also the type of the game obviously because it being a test match an odi or a t20 will have a big influence on this as well and what we found was that novices pretty much always relied on what they could see but skilled players actually used a lot of different information sources to try and work out what was most likely to happen so in this case they're actually using a lot more information around the field setting in the game situation and focusing a bit less on what the bowlers doing when we give all of that information that might seem really really simple but the literature up until quite recently had pretty much just focused on visual information and this was a nice finding to show you well there's obviously some other stuff going on as well then in a follow-up study we had a similar setup but with occlusion points at different places so we'd ask for a prediction before they've even seen the bowler middle of the run up at pre-release so just before the ball comes out and then with some early ball flight and also then again just getting some ratings of what kind of information a skilled batsman is using in these situations and obviously at the pre-run condition where they're not seeing any anything from the bowler they're still using a lot of contextual information and we found it's not shown in this figure that the skilled performers use a lot more contextual information than people who are less skilled and then the visual information is built into the process as the bowler runs in and it becomes more and more reliable until early ball flight comes and that's where our most reliable visual information is starting to appear so we've got performers we've got batters using their understanding of the game fundamentally what is most likely to happen when this is the score this is where the fielders are and this type of bowler is bowling integrating that with them what they're seeing live in order to work out what's going to happen and that's fundamentally how anticipation is working but then obviously we need to link that with an appropriate response and be able to hit the ball for example or leave the ball and there's quite a lot of work actually if you're interested in that decision around it how inhibition works in order to be able to hit or leave and there's been some interesting writings about for example steve smith and minus lab ashamed more elaborate leaves being there because it's actually easier to choose a different action than it is to choose no action at all but that's a story for a different day so I just wanted to show you a bit more evidence here about skilled and less skilled players using different types of information so this is some EEG so looking at the activity going on in different areas of the brain in expert and novice cricketers watching some videos so you have to stay really still with EEG so this really focuses on the perceptual elements and we showed a scoreboard with a game score type of bowler field setting and then a bowler actually running in and bowling and some fit so some visual cues and the key to notice here is you don't have to understand everything that's going on in these pictures the experts perform better across all the different conditions so they're more accurate and actually in contextual conditions so without seeing any ball flight tool they're getting within about 30 centimeters of where the ball would go past them but what we're seeing in the right hand side is at the back of the head so you can see the noses at the top that's where all the visual processing happens around the top in the middle is where all of our movement processing is going to be going on now the front is our kind of problem-solving type of stuff so when we're showing a game situation there's visual processing differences there's motor differences so we're not actually executing any movements in this study but we're seeing differences in the motor area which suggests we're relating the visual input to movements and also some differences in problem-solving type areas as well so an expert's likely to be looking at this and saying in an ODI 100 for 2 off 20.2 overs with the right arm over bowler what's likely to be happening same once seeing a field setting and then once the visual cues coming in we see a lot more visual activity but actually slightly less differences between experts and novices using the visual information because it actually you need to have more experience you need to understand the game better to be able to use that kind of more abstract so if a complete novice looks at a scoreboard they have absolutely no idea what that means but if a complete novice looks at someone's arm going in a certain direction they will know that the ball's likely to go over there so actually we can see some differences in the use of information that's non-visual quite strongly so what I'm going to do now is just talk through the process of a delivery and this starts before the game there's actually not a lot of cricket specific literature here and in this video I'm pretty much just using cricket specific literature because for most of this stuff it's out there which is really nice there's actually loads in baseball you can read about tennis two studies here in field hockey in tennis which actually interviewed players about their processes in anticipation in returning a serve or saving a penalty corner in international field hockey and actually the coaches and players here where I were interviewed using qualitative approach now identified that their anticipation processes they start a long time before the game even begins so you'll be aware of having performance analysts for example this is more contextual information that's going in way before you even get to the game and actually in cricket if you're not opening the batting you might been watching the bowlers from the sideline you might be looking at the conditions of the pitch is it staying a bit low is it bouncing is it seeming is it swinging when you're doing your laps are you seeing how the ball's moving in the air you're picking up loads of information you might walk out your partner says are this guy likes to bowl a big in duck or he's got a slow ball all of this is playing in before you're even facing a delivery and in in hockey the key themes that were pre-match video analysis and then that playing into the perception and action so picking up information and responding process in a game and also that psychological factors are going to affect that like confidence or anxiety for example so lots going on before the game even starts and then we've got some pre-delivery so you're maybe you're actually batting now you're going to be in a certain field setting you're going to have a certain game score you're going to have seen previous deliveries from the same bowler and on the left hand side there you can see an image which shows the big circles are correct outcomes of three different deliveries relative to where the stumps are the numbers are centimeters by the way so we've got a blue one which is kind of shortish on leg stump we've got a red one which is kind of top of off we've got a green one a bit wider outside off so the ball is coming from the other direction this is like wicket keepers for you the small dots are skilled batters prediction to where the ball's going to go and the diamonds are the average prediction of the batters so what's interesting here is these predictions were taken before anyone saw the bowler just being given a field setting a game score and saying where do you think the ball's going to go past the stumps we can see they're not perfect but the predictions are already moving towards the correct outcome so most of the blue ones are close to the blue most of the green are close to the green and most of the red are around the red and the average predictions are moving in the right direction before the bowler has even run in it's likely that we start around the top of off stump when we're trying to work out any kind delivery from certain theoretical approaches like a Bayesian active inference approach we're probably going to be prioritizing information which has a bad outcome which being bold is probably going to be that in cricket so we'll be working away from the stumps but our predictions are moving in the right direction before you've even actually seen anything happen just from understanding the game knowing the field setting and the game score as well so the bowl is running in I've skipped the run up because basically nothing useful comes from the run up there's not a lot of information until the bowler gets into the action so when I'm talking pre-release I'm talking that bowling action just before the ball comes out up to the point that the ball leaves the fingers and this is where a lot of the earlier work was done understanding anticipation in cricket and this is also when we're going to be starting to move as well so in some of the other videos like rob's and there's the skill acquisition video that you've got from Alex you're going to be hearing about different theoretical approaches about connecting perception and action and that's the kind of interesting conversation to have about some of the stuff we've talked about already because we've got some evidence that people are using this information but you don't actually need to move yet how's that affecting our movements but when we're getting to pre-release we're probably going into a trigger movement depending if you've got one certainly getting a back lift up so the movement element is coming in as well so at pre-release this is someone where some of the earlier work from Sean Muller Bruce Abernathy Damien Farrow later on Dave Mann as well was getting done and we have like a long-term evidence base across lots of different sports that really really good people can pick up visual cues from opponents which have more meaning that's why we're talking about perceptual skills not necessarily visual skills there's some actually some good research from Dave Mann showing that you can lose quite a lot of vision before you lose your ability to hit the ball but they can pick up information from the bowler earlier and it has more meaning so this study looked at world-class batters anticipating bowlers outcomes back in 2006 and actually some intermediate and low skill players could pick up certain cues from the bowler but the highly skilled players demonstrate the additional and unique capability to pick up advanced information from specific places such as the bowling hand or the bowling arm so we are starting to integrate that visual information that we talked about at the beginning with those contextual factors that we had as well so for example picture Mendis here you might know a bit about Mendis you might know what type of deliveries he's got in his locker that's contextual factors and then you might see the wrist in a certain position and confirm that you know that that means he's going to bowl a top spinner for example so learning to pick up those cues is an important part of becoming good at anticipating as well and this is where we're probably then saying well that means I might be getting a cue that I want to be going forward or backwards as well so that then gets really really certain when we see early ball flight so those early periods of ball flight I'm talking maybe 100 milliseconds of ball flight make a big difference so all the way up to ball bounce and obviously with a spinner you can move a little bit later but that early ball flight has a lot of information in it so some more work from Sean Muller here across a couple different studies that actually used bats is actually hitting the ball against bowlers on the left hand side against spinners on the right hand side against seamers wearing what we call occlusion goggles where you can basically really accurately to a few milliseconds and remove someone's vision by rapidly changing these goggles so you can't see anymore in a nutshell to look at where information is being picked up from so they're wearing these occlusion glasses so they either have a condition where you see no ball flight at all so just those cues we talked about in the last slide or you get the early ball flight information as well and they measured the front move forward or back and then also the quality of bat ball contact so it did it go in the direction I'm trying to hit it or did I edge it or skew it off in another direction so both high and low skill players can hit the ball 20 or 30 percent of the time from spinners just from the pre-release cues and actually against the seamers some of the people were hitting up to like 70 percent of the time with the seamers without actually seeing the ball flight at all and so that's that's pretty good and the main difference between the high and low skilled at the pre-release cues would be able to pick short balls better if you're if you're a more skilled player and then high skilled players were hitting 70 or 80 percent deliveries when it was occluded at ball bounce so just seeing that early ball flight information from spinners and sometimes a hundred percent of the ones from seamers and this is in a in a net environment so it's probably not that much variable bounce on the pitch for example so once we've seen the early ball flight from a seamer we can have a good idea about where the ball's going from a spinner obviously more happens at ball bounce so that makes it a little bit more difficult but early ball flight is is basically to the point where you're going to be able to hit the ball most of the time and bear in mind with no occlusion at all in these studies where it's still not hitting the ball 100 percent of the time obviously so there's an effect of the length of delivery here as well where certain types of information are more important depending on the length so we saw the high skilled batters better picking up short balls from those cues before ball flight so the ball flight is is adding a lot depending on what type of ball you've got what type of length delivery you're getting as well so we've now gone through talking to a performance analyst understand the game situation where they're likely to bowl with a certain field setting that being then integrated with what the ball is doing in their action and early ball flight and at this point you're making that decisive front or forward front or backward foot movement or hopefully you're making a decisive front or backward foot movement at this point in time which has been informed by all of that information coming up and as i'll talk about later we practice loads and cricket without any of that information actually there and it's something for us to think about moving forward and training design so now the ball's in the air and wanted to talk about the idea of watching the ball there's a really cool study done by Dave Mann and some colleagues that looked at two of the best players in history and to be honest and their idea was there's a lot of existing literature around the claims that baseball or cricket batter can't possibly actually watch the ball because it goes too fast you can't actually move your eyes our eyes actually aren't very good at smoothly moving around they jump when we make those fast movements we can't track stuff as we're making those fast movements so the idea is that basically ball goes too fast so a batter can't possibly watch the ball all the way onto the bat and Dave's story around this is he was chatting to one of the people who participated in this study who said they can tell which side of the ball hits the face of their bat which sounds unbelievable so they tested it so two world-class batters they measured head position eye position and the kind of fundamental finding was that the batters were moving their head so the ball stays in around the same point of their visual field so they're tracking the ball their head but they're actually making predictive eye movements in front of where the ball is one to around where the ball is going to bounce and then another predictive movement so they're looking at where they're going to intercept the ball so where the ball hits the bat they're looking at that position before the ball gets there making what we call an anticipatory saccade so their eyes jumping in front of the ball so they're not tracking it all the way but they are seeing it hit the bat by jumping in front of it so your head's tracking the ball but actually your eyes are in front of where it's going to go for a skilled player at least so it's normally relying on two predictive saccades to anticipate the location of the bounce so seeing that bowling action this is all done in the absence of contextual information by the way using a pro bathroom machine so seeing that ball come out with the cues from the bowler potentially seeing that early ball flight predicting where it's going to bounce using a predictive saccade of your eyes so a big jump with your eyes the locational picture it's going to bounce seeing the ball bounce and then making a big predictive saccade then to where you're actually going to intercept the ball and these players were seeing the ball hitting the bat at a decently high speed which is a pretty amazing skill and something that we do not see from even like good professional players sometimes so it's an amazing skill to have and kind of brings to question the idea that we're telling people to watch the ball when even the best players aren't watching it all the way they're watching it in certain locations so they can predict directly gaze towards the ball as they hit it which is very difficult to do so we've gone through the whole process now we've had the contextual information we've had the pregame we've then had integrated visual information and we've come all the way through and we've hit the ball hopefully whilst seeing it now a lot of those studies don't measure the kinematics of the batter whilst those processes are happening but for example in Sean Muller studies we're looking at they had people actually hitting the ball and measuring that front foot movement and the quality of bat ball contact as well so we're seeing that kind of evolution of information use as we're seeing then actions related to that as well so it might be that if I understand the pitch is a bit more bouncy because of those contextual factors from early on or I've got a really tall ball there I'm probably sitting on the back foot a little bit more but we don't have loads of good biomechanical data about that interaction between that information coming in and the movement responses some of the studies do some of them focus more on those visual elements so I'll talk a bit now about some factors that affect all these processes the first one I wanted to talk about is what we call congruence because I've been talking about all these different types of information now a congruent information simply means it's it's right so this field setting looks like someone's going to bowl a bouncer they do bowl a bouncer that means that information was congruent with the event outcome so I might say right they've got three back on the leg side I've been in for a while looks like they're going to plan B they've bought on their quickest bowler who's best at bowling short likelihood is this is going to be a bouncer maybe I sit a little bit more on the back for I'm at least ready to have my options of ducking weaving or if I'm a personally it would be hooking every single one and it probably not ending super well for me but all of that information is adding up to it being short visual information comes out maybe that's also showing that it's going to be short and it is short then my anticipation is obviously going to be excellent all the information is leading in the right direction but actually maybe then they decide to double bluff me and bowl a yorker so they then the field setting is not congruent with the delivery that they're bowling because I'd expect if they're going to bowl full they're going to have people back straight for example and actually then how all of this information adds up to being congruent with the event outcome causes our anticipation skills to be better or worse and our timing to be better or worse our eye movements can change to being earlier or later and I'll show you some data about that in a minute instead I've gone the screen right now shows skilled and less skilled cricket batters really simple study I did where I showed them field settings and then a bowler running in and the delivery was either matched to the field or not matched to the field what we found was because skilled people are the only ones who are good at using contextual factors like the field setting and the game score when those contextual factors were congruent with the visual information where the ball actually went they perform better than a less skilled group but the less skilled group weren't really affected if the field setting didn't match the delivery because they weren't really using the field setting in the first place but a less but a more skilled player actually got a lot worse if you bowl a bad ball or you bowl a ball that doesn't match the field so we've all got out to her fully before we've all got out to a long hop before and actually we can be in a really bad position to play them because they're not what we're anticipating to get because for example we've seen this bowler bowling a pretty solid bunch of deliveries if they're really erratic we wouldn't use that contextual information because it's not as reliable so we focus on what information we think is reliable and we would maybe focus on visual information more and be less likely to get out to a bad ball from a bad bowler but if we got a bad ball from a consistent bowler where we've been relying on their sequencing knowing that they're probably going to put in a certain area based on a game situation we can get out to bad balls because the information that we've got is misleading and we're maybe in a bad position but that doesn't happen to a less skilled person who's not using that more advanced information and actually full tosses from spinners in international cricket have an incredibly high strike rate they also have an incredibly high average because obviously if you are in a good position they're easier to hit so there is a balance to be had there but understanding how this information links with the actual event that's happening and that makes us understand for example how useful it's going to be to good anticipation performance so this model on the left it is something I wrote to last year to try and put all of this information together so on the left hand side you'll see from preparation there's lots of contextual information being used down to response execution with lots of sensory information so somewhere in that process we're going to be starting to execute movements as well but in cricket often lots of the information is being used before we've even got in our stance and because there's lots going on which stays stable pre-delivery and all of these arrows and boxes on the right hand side show stuff that's going to help so information that's congruent with the event outcome current sensory input that's congruent with what's actually about to happen contextual information that's congruent with what's about to happen and you'll notice I put respond the influence in there so as a batter you're not passive if you're playing a spinner you might come down the track one ball and then you'll be sitting on the back for the next one waiting for them to bowl a shorter one you've made the information be on your side from the sequencing so on the left hand side you might then have deception from your opponent so in that context it might be you've come down the track but the spinner then decides to still borrow your really full flow to you on the next delivery and maybe you get a little bit deceived by it so there's this constant interaction going on between information that you're using to work out what's going to happen and how it relates to what actually is about to happen but you're not the only part of that processes of the batter the bowl is involved the field setting is part of it as well so there's a lot going on constantly updating the type of information you're using whether it has a positive or negative influence on what you're about to work out what's going to happen a few more other things that are obviously going to affect this process so we've got deception from your opponent we've got the things that you're doing and in t20 cricket it might be i'm going to stand miles outside leg stump in order to get them to bowl me a wide one outside off for example or i'm going to ramp this one in order to get a field and move in order for this to happen so you're you have a big part to play in this process as well of how all this information interacts down the right hand side to put a few more things the presence of information that's important for our training i'm going to tell you about that a minute anxiety pretty strongly affects the way our visual behaviors work our vision becomes a little bit more erratic we get more easily distracted by certain features of the environment when we get anxious so actually being scared of a fast bowler and it making us anxious will actually make it harder to anticipate and actually predict where delivery outcomes and hit the ball as well um previous deliveries will have a significant effect as we build up information and also the ball moving in the air swing seem spin but particularly have some good data on swing having an effect on these processes too and we're not a hundred percent just prediction machines we will be updating things all the time it's not like we make a decision at some point and then we just stick to it all the time but we are narrowing probabilities down constantly um and if you're interested in the theoretical angles of this you know you can get in touch with me and we can talk a bit more about the different ways of explaining how all of this works theoretically i'm just really showing you the data here um as well and this is the the mydass model that i wrote last year so that paper's freely available general of expertise is everything is free so it's a really good resource if you're looking to read about these kind of things so i just want to talk a little bit about swing because vishnu sopeshkar did a couple really good papers on this he now works for tampa bay in baseball i think um so these studies recorded batter kinematics in one of the my movements and head movements again different lengths and swings so putting these two studies together is a really kind of quality investigation which you get the visual elements and the movement elements um all measured together to work out what's happening when batters are hitting a ball in cricket so one of the keys was uncertainty about whether the ball is going to swing or not so it's not that you're balling hooping out swingers all the time it's that you might ball a straight one that is causing some difficulties for the players and al alters the movement patterns so alters the way we're moving our feet and the way we're lifting the back for example and then we have curvy linear ball trajectory so the ball swinging reduces performance and decl and delays all of our movements so the key things like getting on the front or back foot and the height the downswing back lift etc the timing of these gets delayed by swinging deliveries now ball that swings away from the batter has a more profound effect on performance or did in these studies than one swinging in so swing delivery from your bowler is going to affect these processes we know that it's harder to play swinging than straight deliveries but literally all of our kinematic movements are getting delayed because we're less sure about the information coming in that uncertainty about whether it's going to swing or not that's the key so the whole time we're using information and actually just when you're walking around the high street or your house you're always using information and you're always relying on what's most certain what's the most reliable source of information here I know this bowl is really erratic I know this captain's rubbish and sets awful fields so I'm not going to use the field I'm just going to focus on what the bowl is doing I know the bowl is really erratic so I'm not going to not going to make any early predictions about whether I want to be sitting forward backwards but then if we have a lot of reliable information we can make really really strong judgments quite early on and make better movements as a result but swing has a big impact on that and so does the length of delivery as well so I'm talking about how we actually go about measuring these things if you want to measure how good someone is anticipation and perceptual motor skills it's got to be task specific you can't be using cognitive testing on an app for example because the information that is really useful is not there the motor skills aren't there and often when we measure it we do remove some of these different types of information too and that has to be kept in mind there's if you watch Rob's video I imagine and Alex's video as well we'll be talking a lot about perception and action so a lot of the ways we measure this in these tasks don't have action responses it just focuses on the visual and perceptual elements which can be useful but also means we don't know whether someone would have actually hit the ball really well if you're testing players we'll often use what we call occlusion methods and which have kind of evolved over time from being basic like computer screens to being you'll see a bowler run in and you'll get included all these different points that we talked about earlier occlusion glasses we talked about earlier where you're actually batting but you can remove the visual information from certain points of the bowler running in but you saw a thing about Sachin Tendulkar training and actually just closing his own eyes at different points of ball flight and trying to hit the ball still to make sure he was able to adapt earlier and later and occasionally so he would shut his eyes when the bowler is running in and open them after balls coming out or the other way around just to you know make sure he's good at getting information from all these different places the picture on the right is me working with some of the england pathways testing anticipation skills using 360 video where the players would get dropped into a pitch in a certain game scenario with the scoreboard and using 360 video in a VR headset this is just an Oculus Quest 2 which one of the most popular Christmas presents this year and we use a GoPro 360 to make the videos it's actually means it's completely portable and you don't need a computer or a high-powered computer and you certainly don't need a computer scientist to make these things so this was just 360 video you put it on the keepers there behind you when the spinners up you can hear all the chat you see the scoreboard you see the field setting and we get the players to talk us through their kind of options what they're thinking and then the video the bowler runs in the video occludes and they tell us where they think the ball's going to go and that's been able to differentiate different levels of play across the age categories so far as well and we can also use what is really virtual reality 360 video isn't really virtual reality it's just video recorded in 360 so you need a VR headset to watch it a real virtual reality task for me and you're actually hitting the ball in the virtual environment too and that's that what beauty of that is it becomes it's very easy to manipulate when you see information you can get really accurate measures of whether where the bat's going and things like that you can also just use biomechanical analysis of someone actually playing see what point they move forward or backwards are they making their movements earlier or later are they making different bat swings for example performance analysis as well who's playing well against what and then just basic more basic performance testing how well are they hitting the ball against different options how are they hitting the ball potentially in combination with an occlusion glasses for example and so it's not particularly easy to force someone to anticipate because we're often seeing the full process and maybe someone's very good at compensating for not using certain information sources with their motor skills it's hard to break all this up which is why I've put that perception and action point in there as well but pretty much all the study we've talked about used some of these methods or a combination of them such as kinematic analysis of the batters eye tracking as well I haven't put eye tracking on that because it doesn't actually measure anticipation skills it just measures what your eyes are doing whilst you use them and we've had verbal reports here as well so lots of different ways to try and measure these things but it's pretty hard to do because it's hard to force someone to have to anticipate and show where they think the ball's going to go before it actually goes there so combination all these things can be pretty useful and I'll talk about how we can train in a minute so the final bit I want to say is you we've got a decent idea of how these processes are working how can we get better at them and my number one answer is include all the information in practice all these things I've been talking about that facilitate your ability to anticipate and execute good perceptual motor skills most of it's missing half the time in practice we regularly practice without any of the contextual information we're normally practicing on on good surfaces which is hard to deal with practically but it's very easy to say it's not for naught you've got three slips in a gully here's some cones to show where they are pinned in the side of a net for example but we often don't include those things either playing against real bowl is really important as well hard to do again practically when we have such strong limits on bowling but here's just a couple images to show the importance of this this is Ross Pinders work on the left where he looked at information movement coupling and we've got an image there which on the left which shows someone hitting a bowl against a bowling machine on the right someone hitting the ball against an actual bowler and that's just to show you are practicing a different thing if you do not include the information that you have in a game and you're practicing different shots and different techniques if we're using drop feeds if we're using bowling machines if we're even using dog throwers we're going to be resulting in a different movement outcome because the information is different and here's here's one of my studies which looked at anticipation and contextual factors and on the left we have a batman hitting the ball he's wearing an eye tracker as well when we've just given them a scenario and on the right with no scenario both the balls pitched in the same place against the real spin bowler and basically you're executing different shots again because you've got different types of information so real life always rules we want to be hitting balls against real bowlers with all the information that we can include or at least exposing people in our pathways to doing that as much as possible and that's hard in cricket when we can't play matches during the summer but that's the fundamental crux of it is people are going to learn how to use the information if it's there they're not going to learn how to use it if it's not and some of these are really key predictors of future performance some of these kind of anticipation skills we actually had a there's a lunchtime chat with the England performance analyst not so long ago talking about the fact that a good schoolboy can hit a bowling machine at 85 miles an hour but they can't hit a bowler and that's for this kind of reason so there's a little paper here from the Journal of Expertise again that Sean Muller and some colleagues have written about embedding what they call psycho perceptual motor skills into training so understanding these skills and getting them into the training environment so you can have a look at that and also check out the constraints and skill out videos i'm not going to talk to you all about theories of training because you've already had two videos about that the number one fundamental is keep it task-specific think about the bowlers too i've talked a lot about batting but this is an interaction between batter and bowler that's going on all the time and also the field setting too and that's the fundamental of what Crickey is an interaction between those two people and and the field setting trying to get one up on each other and there's always going to be an exchange of different types of information between them just wanted to make a note of a couple recent papers from John Brenton where he's looked at motor expertise and the fact that basically perceptual expertise might be linked to motor expertise and there's a variety of theoretical perspectives like common coding we might call it that suggests that if you can do the skill you're better at predicting it as well and they've done some training interventions where they've had for example people learning to bowl in-swingers and out-swingers and getting better at predicting in-swingers and out-swingers as batters as a result so there is an element of being a good all-round player as well queuing for information sources so that might be like saying right well can we put a fluorescent wristband on a leg spin bowler to make sure people are actually attention is going towards their wrist it could be more explicit than that it could be making sure you're discussing the game scenarios when you're practicing your batting all this different kind of things just making sure people are using the information that is there but like I said go watch your skill act videos that have already gone on in this series there's some debate about using inclusion methods for training there are methods out there there's companies that provide these for baseball not at the moment for cricket um but the idea of saying well all this testing we've done where we're cutting it off and you're predicting where the ball's going that's forcing you to try and use the information that's there maybe that's useful there's a few studies out there which show it can be useful but the information is not super strong on using those methods for training yet but they might yet get better especially if we can integrate virtual reality where we have movement responses as well the beauty of VR would be we can be showing you specific deliveries that learn land in specific places much more actually than a than a real life bowler could do um so as VR continues to develop I do think that will probably become a primary use for this kind of thing especially for people who can't be playing because they're injured or because we've run out of overs from our bowlers or because that's one of our key issues obviously is that we can't be facing real bowlers all the time but fundamentally real life rules expose people to the information they're going to get in a game we work loads on technique and isolation expecting that to make us better players we very rarely work on the other end in isolation by discussing things like contextual factors an nfl quarterback spends a lot and a lot of their time just doing just that but we don't really do it in cricket that much understanding what's like to happen in certain situations so that might be something that we can maybe pick up in cricket and develop a little bit more I hope that was useful if you're interested in how some of this stuff works more theoretically then do feel free to get in touch touch and have a chat about it you can find out more about the variety of other work I do on runswithperformance.com or you can follow me on twitter drop me an email get in touch however you'd like but thanks again for stew to invite me along and I hope you enjoyed listening