# Situational Analysis and Tactical Decision-Making in Elite Handball Players
## 1 Introduction
### Methodological Approaches in Decision-Making Research  
There are two approaches to studying decision-making processes [17]. The naturalistic approach addresses how a player analyzes a situation in a real context, examines collective capabilities such as coordination between actors, develops a strategic plan, and shares tactical awareness. The cognitive approach, on the other hand, studies the strategies for gathering information in the environment, the organization of the knowledge acquired by the player, and the memory processes involved [17]. These analyses are quantitative and are performed using implicit methods, explicit methods, or perceptual tasks. As recently expressed by [PERSON] et al. (2020) [17], explicit methods use simple questions and verbalizations; implicit methods use recall and recognition tasks, in which subjects have to find the correct objects or locations; and perceptual tasks are based on the use of temporal occlusion. To the best of our knowledge, the last method allows for capturing differences among experts, primarily in the anticipation phase of a decision. The main advantage of this method is the ability to analyze the selection of information relevant to the decision making, although ecological validity is limited [14]. Considering the importance of the ecological validity of research and, at the same time, the frequent impossibility of observing phenomena directly in their natural condition, methods based on computer simulation have been classified as essential to examine this type of phenomenon [8] (pp. 91-93). In particular, temporal occlusion has been used to study the quality and the accuracy of decisions made by athletes and, likewise, to examine how these aspects are influenced by various covariates, such as age, the relative age effect, or competence, as well as acute factors such as fatigue [3]. Comparisons between experienced and non-experienced players have shown that the experts' superior skills allow them to make accurate decisions faster than their non-experienced counterparts [23-26]. The higher performance of expert athletes depends primarily on the internal mental representations and cognitive processes that mediate the interpretation of a stimulus and the selection of an appropriate response [3].  
In summary, decision-making is the ability of players to choose functional actions from several possible actions that emerge from the environment to achieve a specific goal [3]. Therefore, it is an important factor for successful performance in team sports [27]. However, few studies have attempted to analyze the knowledge of situational probabilities in decision-making.  
In this respect, this study aimed to address differences among handballers belonging to two different tiers (i.e., national first- (A1) or second-tier (A2) in processing situational probabilities information related to four game situations. The following hypotheses were tested: (1) athletes who played in the first-tier Italian handball league (A1) analyzed game situations with greater accuracy and technical correctness than players of the second-tier league (A2); (2) there is a direct relationship between the membership to a tier and accuracy and technical correctness in athletes' knowledge of situational probabilities in game situations with different level of complexity.