ABSTRACT
Since the late 1960s, cognitive psychology has come to be one of the major driving forces within the discipline as a whole. From the point of view of sports science, since the mid 1970s its influence in the field of motor behaviour has also been significant. ‘Cognitive psychology refers to all processes by which the sensory input is transformed, reduced, elaborated, stored, recovered and used’ (Neisser, 1967), and psychologists working in this tradition have long been interested in topics such as perception, memory, decision making, attention, language and problem solving. The dominant paradigm which has emerged is that based on information processing and indeed, in many people’s eyes, cognitive psychology has become synonymous with this approach. Within sport, much of the early research on human movement, conducted under the rubric of motor learning and motor control (see Chapter 5), likewise utilized an information processing paradigm. As such, these areas of motor behaviour are well rooted in cognitive psychology and deal specifically with problems surrounding the acquisition and control of movement skills, for example perception, memory and attention. However, as Sanford (1985: 1) points out ‘this is not to say that cognitive psychologists are not concerned with the emotions or motivation but rather to say that these issues have been less well treated in cognitive psychology than cognition itself.
