The current study examined positional specificity effects
within the sport of netball. Netball is a relatively unique
sport because players are zoned in the areas into which they
can move (goaler, centre court and defence). Thus if specificity
effects do occur, they would be expected in a sport
such as netball as players typically only play within one
region of the court and do so from a relatively early stage
of their career. Skilled and novice netballers completed a
video-based decision making task that presented scenarios
they would commonly experience in their own position as
well as the other remaining playing areas (goaler, centre
court and defence). It was hypothesised, in line with previous
research, that the skilled players would have greater
decision making accuracy than the novice participants due to
their greater netball specific experiences.14 Additionally, it
was hypothesised that the skilled athletes would demonstrate
a position specificity bias and consequently be most accurate
on the scenarios from which they are most familiar with,
namely their own positional area due to the development of
specific memory representations for the task,7 whereas the
novice participants would show no positional biases due to
their limited netball experience.