Never Too Much-More talent in football (always) leads to more success.

Though it may appear counterintuitive, certain positive attributes can eventually have negative consequences when taken to an extreme. This concept is exemplified in sports, where an increase in talent among team members initially leads to improved success, but beyond a certain threshold, excessive talent can adversely affect the team. This occurrence is known as the Too Much Talent (TMT) effect, wherein status conflicts among highly skilled players can hinder team performance, particularly in sports that require coordination and cooperation. While early evidence supported the TMT effect in team sports, its validity has recently been challenged. In this study, we analyzed a comprehensive dataset consisting of 780 data points across 42 seasons from seven top European football (soccer) leagues to examine the TMT effect's presence. Our findings reveal that football does not exhibit the TMT effect. Instead, we observed a consistent, positive correlation between the number of skilled players on a team and team success. Additionally, talent did not display diminishing returns, as its impact on success remained stable even at the highest concentrations of talent. We relate our results to existing theories and propose that future research comparing more individualistic and interdependent team sports could further enhance the field.

Gritting One's way to success - Grit explains skill in elite youth soccer players beyond (deliberate) practice.

Practice is one of the most important predictors of skill. To become an expert, performers must engage in practice for a prolonged time to develop the psychological characteristics necessary for outstanding performance. Deliberate practice (DP), that is focused repetitive activities with corrective feedback, is particularly beneficial for skill development. The amount of accumulated DP differentiates experts and novices. However, the predictive strength of DP weakens considerably when it comes to differentiating between differently skilled experts, leaving a way clear for other non-practice related factors to exercise their influence. In this paper, we demonstrate using a large sample (388) of elite youth soccer players that one such factor, the personality trait of grit, predicts expertise level both directly and indirectly. Grittier players accumulated more time in coach-led team practice, the activity, which is arguably closest to DP in team sports, which in turn predicted the skill level. Other practice activities, such as self-led training or playing with peers, were not predictive of skill level, neither were they influenced by grit. Grit, however, continued to exert a direct positive influence on the skill level of players even after accounting for the hours of DP accumulated. Overall, a standard deviation of change in the grit score resulted in at least a third of standard deviation improvement in skill. Our findings highlight the need for the inclusion of additional factors in theoretical frameworks in situations where the predictive power of traditional expertise factors, such as practice, is limited.

The effect of COVID-19 on home advantage in high- and low-stake situations: Evidence from the European national football competitions.

The Covid-19 pandemic has significantly altered the way sporting events are observed. With the absence or limited presence of spectators in stadiums, the traditional advantage enjoyed by home teams has diminished considerably. This underscores the notion that the support of home fans can often be considered a key factor of the home advantage (HA) phenomenon, wherein teams perform better in front of their own supporters. However, the impact of reduced attendance on games with higher stakes, as opposed to low-stakes friendly matches, remains uncertain. In this study, we investigate the recently concluded European football championship (EURO 20), wherein several teams had the advantage of playing at home in high-stakes games with only one-third of the stadium capacity filled. Firstly, we demonstrate that the Covid-19 restrictions, leading to reduced fan attendance, resulted in a nearly 50% decrease in HA compared to the HA exhibited by the same teams during the qualification stage preceding EURO 20, even after accounting for team strength. Secondly, we show that while low-stakes friendly matches generally exhibit a smaller overall HA compared to high-stakes games, the absence of fans led to a similar reduction in HA during the low-stakes matches. Utilizing the recently developed Home Advantage Mediated (HAM) model (Bilalic, Gula, & Vaci, 2021, Scientific Reports, 21558), we were able to attribute the reduction in both high- and low-stakes games to poorer team performance, with no significant contribution from referee bias.

Tracing Cognitive Processes in Insight Problem Solving: Using GAMs and Change Point Analysis to Uncover Restructuring.

Insight problems are likely to trigger an initial, incorrect mental representation, which needs to be restructured in order to find the solution. Despite the widespread theoretical assumption that this restructuring process happens suddenly, leading to the typical "Aha!" experience, the evidence is inconclusive. Among the reasons for this lack of clarity is that many measures of insight rely solely on the solvers' subjective experience of the solution process. In our previous paper, we used matchstick arithmetic problems to demonstrate that it is possible to objectively trace problem-solving processes by combining eye movements with new analytical and statistical approaches. Specifically, we divided the problem-solving process into ten (relative) temporal phases to better capture possible small changes in problem representation. Here, we go a step further to demonstrate that classical statistical procedures, such as ANOVA, cannot capture sudden representational change processes, which are typical for insight problems. Only nonlinear statistical models, such as generalized additive (mixed) models (GAMs) and change points analysis, correctly identified the abrupt representational change. Additionally, we demonstrate that explicit hints reorient participants' focus in a qualitatively different manner, changing the dynamics of restructuring in insight problem solving. While insight problems may indeed require a sudden restructuring of the initial mental representation, more sophisticated analytical and statistical approaches are necessary to uncover their true nature.

Spotting lesions in thorax X-rays at a glance: holistic processing in radiology.

Radiologists often need only a glance to grasp the essence of complex medical images. Here, we use paradigms and manipulations from perceptual learning and expertise fields to elicit mechanisms and limits of holistic processing in radiological expertise. In the first experiment, radiologists were significantly better at categorizing thorax X-rays when they were presented for 200 ms in an upright orientation than when they were presented upside-down. Medical students, in contrast, were guessing in both situations. When the presentation time was increased to 500 ms, allowing for a couple more glances, the radiologists improved their performance on the upright stimuli, but remained at the same level on the inverted presentation. The second experiment circumvented the holistic processing by immediately cueing a tissue within the X-rays, which may or may not contain a nodule. Radiologists were again better than medical students at recognizing whether the cued tissue was a nodule, but this time neither the inverted presentation nor additional time affected their performance. Our study demonstrates that holistic processing is most likely a continuous recurring process which is just as susceptible to the inversion effect as in other expertise domains. More importantly, our study also indicates that holistic-like processing readily occurs in complex stimuli (e.g., whole thorax X-rays) but is more difficult to find in uniform single parts of such stimuli (e.g., nodules).

Home advantage mediated (HAM) by referee bias and team performance during covid.

The fans' importance in sports is acknowledged by the term 'the 12th man', a figurative extra player for the home team. Sport teams are indeed more successful when they play in front of their fans than when they play away. The supposed mechanism behind this phenomenon, termed Home Advantage (HA), is that fans' support spurs home players to better performance and biases referees, which in turn determines the outcome. The inference about the importance of fans' support is, however, indirect as there is normally a 12th man of this kind, even if it is an opponent's. The current pandemic, which forced sporting activities to take place behind closed doors, provides the necessary control condition. Here we employ a novel conceptual HA model on a sample of over 4000 soccer matches from 12 European leagues, some played in front of spectators and some in empty stadia, to demonstrate that fans are indeed responsible for the HA. However, the absence of fans reduces the HA by a third, as the home team's performance suffers and the officials' bias disappears. The current pandemic reveals that the figurative 12th man is no mere fan hyperbole, but is in fact the most important player in the home team.

Home advantage during the COVID-19 pandemic: Analyses of European football leagues.

The home advantage (HA) is a robust phenomenon in football whereby the home team wins more games and scores more goals than the away team. One explanation is that the home crowd spurs on home team performance and causes the referee to unconsciously favour the home team. The Covid-19 (COVID) pandemic provided a unique opportunity to assess this explanation for HA, as European football leagues played part of the 2019/2020 season with crowds present and concluded with crowds absent. Using multi-level modelling we compared team performance and referee decisions pre-COVID (crowd present) and during-COVID (crowd absent) across 4844 games from 15 leagues in 11 countries. HA (goals scored and points gained) was significantly reduced during-COVID, which reflected the inferior performance of the home team. In games without fans, home teams created significantly fewer attacking opportunities and referee-bias was diluted when controlling for the attacking dominance of teams; such that the number of fouls and yellow cards ruled against away sides, while still significant, was reduced and no effects were observed for red cards. Implications for sporting practice and directions for future research are discussed.

Reading the Future from Body Movements -Anticipation in Handball.

In speed-based sports that require fast reactions, the most accurate predictions are made once the players have seen the ball trajectory. However, waiting for the ball trajectory does not leave enough time for appropriate reactions. Expert athletes use kinematic information which they extract from the opponent's movements to anticipate the ball trajectory. Temporal occlusion, where only a part of the full movement sequence is presented, has often been used to research anticipation in sports. Unlike many previous studies, we chose occlusion points in video-stimuli of penalty shooting in handball based on the domain-specific analysis of movement sequences. Instead of relying on randomly chosen occlusion points, each time point in our study revealed a specific chunk of information about the direction of the ball. The multivariate analysis showed that handball goalkeepers were not only more accurate and faster than novices overall when predicting where the ball will end up, but that experts and novices also made their decisions based on different kinds of movement sequences. These findings underline the importance of kinematic knowledge for anticipation, but they also demonstrate the significance of carefully chosen occlusion points.

Can You See What I Hear?

Previous research on inattentional blindness (IB) has focused almost entirely on the visual modality. This study extends the paradigm by pairing visual with auditory stimuli. New visual and auditory stimuli were created to investigate the phenomenon of inattention in visual, auditory, and paired modality. The goal of the study was to assess to what extent the pairing of visual and auditory modality fosters the detection of change. Participants watched a video sequence and counted predetermined words in a spoken text. IB and inattentional deafness occurred in about 40% of participants when attention was engaged by this difficult (auditory) counting task. Most importantly, participants detected the changes considerably more often (88%) when the change occurred in both modalities rather than just one. One possible reason for the drastic reduction of IB or deafness in a multimodal context is that discrepancy between expected and encountered course of events proportionally increases across sensory modalities.

When the Solution Is on the Doorstep: Better Solving Performance, but Diminished Aha! Experience for Chess Experts on the Mutilated Checkerboard Problem.

Insight problems are difficult because the initially activated knowledge hinders successful solving. The crucial information needed for a solution is often so far removed that gaining access to it through restructuring leads to the subjective experience of "Aha!". Although this assumption is shared by most insight theories, there is little empirical evidence for the connection between the necessity of restructuring an incorrect problem representation and the Aha! experience. Here, we demonstrate a rare case where previous knowledge facilitates the solving of insight problems but reduces the accompanying Aha! experience. Chess players were more successful than non-chess players at solving the mutilated checkerboard insight problem, which requires retrieval of chess-related information about the color of the squares. Their success came at a price, since they reported a diminished Aha! experience compared to controls. Chess players' problem-solving ability was confined to that particular problem, since they struggled to a similar degree to non-chess players to solve another insight problem (the eight-coin problem), which does not require chess-related information for a solution. Here, chess players and non-chess players experienced the same degree of insight.

The joint influence of intelligence and practice on skill development throughout the life span.

The relative importance of different factors in the development of human skills has been extensively discussed. Research on expertise indicates that focused practice may be the sole determinant of skill, while intelligence researchers underline the relative importance of abilities at even the highest level of skill. There is indeed a large body of research that acknowledges the role of both factors in skill development and retention. It is, however, unknown how intelligence and practice come together to enable the acquisition and retention of complex skills across the life span. Instead of focusing on the 2 factors, intelligence and practice, in isolation, here we look at their interplay throughout development. In a longitudinal study that tracked chess players throughout their careers, we show that both intelligence and practice positively affect the acquisition and retention of chess skill. Importantly, the nonlinear interaction between the 2 factors revealed that more intelligent individuals benefited more from practice. With the same amount of practice, they acquired chess skill more quickly than less intelligent players, reached a higher peak performance, and arrested decline in older age. Our research demonstrates the futility of scrutinizing the relative importance of highly intertwined factors in human development.

Parsing rooms: the role of the PPA and RSC in perceiving object relations and spatial layout.

The perception of a scene involves grasping the global space of the scene, usually called the spatial layout, as well as the objects in the scene and the relations between them. The main brain areas involved in scene perception, the parahippocampal place area (PPA) and retrosplenial cortex (RSC), are supposed to mostly support the processing of spatial layout. Here we manipulated the objects and their relations either by arranging objects within rooms in a common way or by scattering them randomly. The rooms were then varied for spatial layout by keeping or removing the walls of the room, a typical layout manipulation. We then combined a visual search paradigm, where participants actively search for an object within the room, with multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA). Both left and right PPA were sensitive to the layout properties, but the right PPA was also sensitive to the object relations even when the information about objects and their relations is used in the cross-categorization procedure on novel stimuli. The left and right RSC were sensitive to both spatial layout and object relations, but could only use the information about object relations for cross-categorization to novel stimuli. These effects were restricted to the PPA and RSC, as other control brain areas did not display the same pattern of results. Our results underline the importance of employing paradigms that require participants to explicitly retrieve domain-specific processes and indicate that objects and their relations are processed in the scene areas to a larger extent than previously assumed.

Large data and Bayesian modeling-aging curves of NBA players.

Researchers interested in changes that occur as people age are faced with a number of methodological problems, starting with the immense time scale they are trying to capture, which renders laboratory experiments useless and longitudinal studies rather rare. Fortunately, some people take part in particular activities and pastimes throughout their lives, and often these activities are systematically recorded. In this study, we use the wealth of data collected by the National Basketball Association to describe the aging curves of elite basketball players. We have developed a new approach rooted in the Bayesian tradition in order to understand the factors behind the development and deterioration of a complex motor skill. The new model uses Bayesian structural modeling to extract two latent factors, those of development and aging. The interaction of these factors provides insight into the rates of development and deterioration of skill over the course of a player's life. We show, for example, that elite athletes have different levels of decline in the later stages of their career, which is dependent on their skill acquisition phase. The model goes beyond description of the aging function, in that it can accommodate the aging curves of subgroups (e.g., different positions played in the game), as well as other relevant factors (e.g., the number of minutes on court per game) that might play a role in skill changes. The flexibility and general nature of the new model make it a perfect candidate for use across different domains in lifespan psychology.

A network view on brain regions involved in experts' object and pattern recognition: Implications for the neural mechanisms of skilled visual perception.

Skilled visual object and pattern recognition form the basis of many everyday behaviours. The game of chess has often been used as a model case for studying how long-term experience aides in perceiving objects and their spatio-functional interrelations. Earlier research revealed two brain regions, posterior middle temporal gyrus (pMTG) and collateral sulcus (CoS), to be linked to chess experts' superior object and pattern recognition, respectively. Here we elucidated the brain networks these two expertise-related regions are embedded in, employing resting-state functional connectivity analysis and meta-analytic connectivity modelling with the BrainMap database. pMTG was preferentially connected with dorsal visual stream areas and a parieto-prefrontal network for action planning, while CoS was preferentially connected with posterior medial cortex and hippocampus, linked to scene perception, perspective-taking and navigation. Functional profiling using BrainMap meta-data revealed that pMTG was linked to semantic processing as well as inhibition and attention, while CoS was linked to face and shape perception as well as passive viewing. Our findings suggest that pMTG subserves skilled object recognition by mediating the link between object identity and object affordances, while CoS subserves skilled pattern recognition by linking the position of individual objects with typical spatio-functional layouts of their environment stored in memory.

Chess databases as a research vehicle in psychology: Modeling large data.

The game of chess has often been used for psychological investigations, particularly in cognitive science. The clear-cut rules and well-defined environment of chess provide a model for investigations of basic cognitive processes, such as perception, memory, and problem solving, while the precise rating system for the measurement of skill has enabled investigations of individual differences and expertise-related effects. In the present study, we focus on another appealing feature of chess-namely, the large archive databases associated with the game. The German national chess database presented in this study represents a fruitful ground for the investigation of multiple longitudinal research questions, since it collects the data of over 130,000 players and spans over 25 years. The German chess database collects the data of all players, including hobby players, and all tournaments played. This results in a rich and complete collection of the skill, age, and activity of the whole population of chess players in Germany. The database therefore complements the commonly used expertise approach in cognitive science by opening up new possibilities for the investigation of multiple factors that underlie expertise and skill acquisition. Since large datasets are not common in psychology, their introduction also raises the question of optimal and efficient statistical analysis. We offer the database for download and illustrate how it can be used by providing concrete examples and a step-by-step tutorial using different statistical analyses on a range of topics, including skill development over the lifetime, birth cohort effects, effects of activity and inactivity on skill, and gender differences.

Revisiting the Role of the Fusiform Face Area in Expertise.

The fusiform face area (FFA) is considered to be a highly specialized brain module because of its central importance for face perception. However, many researchers claim that the FFA is a general visual expertise module that distinguishes between individual examples within a single category. Here, I circumvent the shortcomings of some previous studies on the FFA controversy by using chess stimuli, which do not visually resemble faces, together with more sensitive methods of analysis such as multivariate pattern analysis. I also extend the previous research by presenting chess positions, complex scenes with multiple objects, and their interrelations to chess experts and novices as well as isolated chess objects. The first experiment demonstrates that chess expertise modulated the FFA activation when chess positions were presented. In contrast, single chess objects did not produce different activation patterns among experts and novices even when the multivariate pattern analysis was used. The second experiment focused on the single chess objects and featured an explicit task of identifying the chess objects but failed to demonstrate expertise effects in the FFA. The experiments provide support for the general expertise view of the FFA function but also extend the scope of our understanding about the function of the FFA. The FFA does not merely distinguish between different exemplars within the same category of stimuli. More likely, it parses complex multiobject stimuli that contain numerous functional and spatial relations.

The Faces in Radiological Images: Fusiform Face Area Supports Radiological Expertise.

The fusiform face area (FFA) has often been used as an example of a brain module that was developed through evolution to serve a specific purpose-face processing. Many believe, however, that FFA is responsible for holistic processing associated with any kind of expertise. The expertise view has been tested with various stimuli, with mixed results. One of the main stumbling blocks in the FFA controversy has been the fact that the stimuli used have been similar to faces. Here, we circumvent the problem by using radiological images, X-rays, which bear no resemblance to faces. We demonstrate that FFA can distinguish between X-rays and other stimuli by employing multivariate pattern analysis. The sensitivity to X-rays was significantly better in experienced radiologists than that in medical students with limited radiological experience. For the radiologists, it was also possible to use the patterns of FFA activations obtained on faces to differentiate X-ray stimuli from other stimuli. The overlap in the FFA activation is not based on visual similarity of faces and X-rays but rather on the processes necessary for expertise with both kinds of stimulus. Our results support the expertise view that FFA's main function is related to holistic processing.

Is age really cruel to experts? Compensatory effects of activity.

Age-related decline may not be as pronounced in complex activities as it is in basic cognitive processes, but ability deterioration with age is difficult to deny. However, studies disagree on whether age is kinder to more able people than it is to their less able peers. In this article, we investigated the "age is kinder to the more able" hypothesis by using a chess database that contains activity records for both beginners and world-class players. The descriptive data suggested that the skill function across age captures the 3 phases as described in Simonton's model of career trajectories: initial rise to the peak of performance, postpeak decline, and eventual stabilization of decline. We therefore modeled the data with a linear mixed-effect model using the cubic function that captures 3 phases. The results show that age may be kind to the more able in a subtler manner than has previously been assumed. After reaching the peak at around 38 years, the more able players deteriorated more quickly. Their decline, however, started to slow down at around 52 years, earlier than for less able players (57 years). Both the decline and its stabilization were significantly influenced by activity. The more players engaged in playing tournaments, the less they declined and the earlier they started to stabilize. The best experts may not be immune to aging, but their previously acquired expertise and current activity enable them to maintain high levels of skill even at an advanced age.