Relationship between Bird's-Eye View Cognition and Visual Search Behavior
Authors: Kanda Keisuke , Ishiwatari Hiromi , Watanuki Keiichi 
Published: June 2023

In general, professional soccer players excel at situational judgment and express the game situation as if they are viewing the game from directly above the pitch.This cognitive method is called the bird's-eye view and is considered important for accurate situational judgment. It is also known that expert soccer players exhibit visual search behaviors specific to different situations, such as attacking, defending, and one-on-one play. Therefore, there is possibly a visual search behavior unique to bird's-eye view cognition. In this study, we investigated the effects of improvement in bird's-eye view ability on visual search behavior by using a training method involving virtual reality, which was already developed in a previous study. By revealing the visual search behavior specific to the bird's-eye view, we expect to develop a new training method that adds eye-gaze support. In this study, we developed a virtual reality-based bird's-eye view training system using the Unity game engine, a Head Mounted Display, and an HTC VIVE controller. The system consisted of a training task for training the bird's-eye view ability and a three-choice question for evaluating it. The training task consisted of three phases: showing a first-person video from the center of a soccer pitch, sorting player positions on a bird's-eye map of the pitch, and presenting the correct answers. First, we examined the effects of a training task on the bird's-eye view ability in a system. The experiment was conducted on nine male subjects aged between 20 and 30. The subjects were divided equally into three groups. An experimental group was assigned the training task, control group 1 were showed the first-person video and were informed about the correct answers, and a control group 2 were only provided with the first-person video. The participants answered 10 three-choice questions as a pre-task, performed the training task 10 times, and answered 10 three-choice questions as a post-task. At the end of the experiment, the participants answered a questionnaire about their experience with sports, video games, and changes in their cognition. As a result, the experimental group and control group 1 performed better on the post-task than on the pre-task in training. In particular, the growth rate of the scores of the experimental group was higher than that of control group 1. This suggests that the participants may have acquired a bird's-eye view of cognition through training. In addition, in the questionnaire, two participants in the experimental group responded that they "stopped shaking their heads a lot”. This suggests that the improvement of bird's-eye view ability may have influenced the visual search behavior. Next, we conducted an experiment to investigate the relationship between bird's-eye view cognition and visual search behavior based on eye-gaze information and head movements during training. This experiment clarified the relationship between bird's-eye view cognition and visual search behavior, and is expected to lead to the development of better bird's-eye view training using eye gaze support.