Tau influence on Decision Making in Basketball

Abstract

Decision making in sport emerges from the players’ interaction with the game context (Araújo, Davids, & Hristovski, 2006). Results from studies on the one-on-one in basketball identified interpersonal distance and relative velocity as relevant variables (i.e., control parameters). These results are reinterpreted in the perspective of the General Tau Theory (Lee, 1998), in which movement is regarded as guided by controlling tau motion-gaps (time to fulfil a gap) and tau-couplings. Further empirical evidence for this argument, came from a recent study in a team ball sport, where the tau variable was considered and verified as significantly related to decisional behaviour. Following this, it is assumed that the focus in candidate control parameters that detach the spatial component from the temporal one, presented in previous studies, may not be sufficient to explain the decisional behaviour in basketball. In this way, the variable tau is proposed as more informative given that enfolds inextricably spatial-temporal information.