THE ECOLOGICAL AND COGNITIVE APPROACHES IN FOOTBALL/FUTSAL DECISION-MAKING

Football is a team ball sport in which competitive performance has been analyzed from different theoretical perspectives to be understood. In this investigation, we sought to perform a narrative review of the literature concerning decision-making in football and futsal. Our investigative narrative revealed that there are two different perspectives to describe and explain decision making in football/futsal: an ecological approach and a cognitive approach. The first supports that players' decision-making is underpinned by the perception-action couplings where decisions are sustained on continuous interactions between the player and the context. Thus, players need to actively explore opponent's and teammate's contextual information from the environment, such as postural orientation, interpersonal distances, relative positions, running line direction, and velocity which specifies the affordances that the environment offers to act. On the other hand, studies on the cognitive approach support that players' decision-making process is sustained by the information processing with emphasis on previous knowledge stored in memory. Hence, there is a control center ( brain) that commands actions, that is, decisions are centered on the players' and what they store in his memory. Thus, the players' decisions are sequential, hierarchical, and related to visual perception, which is associated with the brain's ability to process and analyze information in different scenarios. Our investigation reveals that the present study is the first narrative review design to assess the decision-making process in football, regarding its theoretical approaches. To sum, we believe that new studies on the decision-making process in football should seek to incorporate both perspectives to try to better understand how these processes influence performance.