Information Processing Notes

Input

Information can include the pictures, sounds and feelings that convey informationto you. In other words your senses supply you with information.

In an example of a netball pass, you the receiver must take in all that is going on around you, through your eyes, hears and hands. You mus also be aware of the position of your arms and legs.

The information comes form the environment that surrounds the performer. This information is called the display.

The brain has to decide what the information being received from the environment represents. This information is sensory information that comes through our senses, the first stage of information processing is called the stimulus identification stage.

The other stages in desicision making are:

• Response Selection - deciding how to respond
• Response programming - selecting a response

Perception

Stimulus Identification stage is primarily a sensory stage, involving the analysis of all the various bits of information about the surrounding environment that is received from a variety of senses. As part of this process the performer must also make sense of this information. This is the idea of proprioception.

Information is defined as that which enables a performer to decide how much to act. In sport, information comes from the specific environment that we are concerned with, but it also comes from the memory of relevant previous situations.

There are two types of environmental information: from the external environment and from the internal environment. Information from the external environment include:

• Vision - which defines the physical structure of the environment
• Hearing

Information from the internal environment is called proprioceptive information (Body Awareness), proprioception has three components:

• Touch - which is a tactile sense that detects pressure, pain, temperature etc.
• Equilibrium - which is balance, tipping, turning, inverting etc.
• Kinaesthesis - which is a sense that provides information about the state of contraction of muscles, tendons or joints. When a performer becomes highly skilled, they instinctively know if a movement was performed correctly due to this.

All these senses then convey information to our brain, whether it is the correct information depends upon perception.

All of these factors are stimuli. Stimuli in a game situation include things like the ball, opponents, teammates etc. It is easy to sense and identify these things if they are loud, bright, large, contrasting, fast moving or unusual. This is why your teammates wear the same kit as you as it makes them easier to identify.

During Perception identification of a stimulus occurs, this involves three elements:

• Detection - the process of registering the stimulus, by the sense organ
• Comparison - the process of referring the stimulus to memory, to compare it to previously stored stimuli
• Detection - the process of finding corresponding stimuli in the memory

During a sporting activity we will be receiving a tremendous amount of information from our senses. The vast majority of it is ignored, as we regard this information as irrelevant.

We try to be solely concerned with the activity in question, and more importantly…