# The Relevance of General Spatial Anticipation Skills for Basketball Referees
## 1 Introduction
Although the magnitude of the encoded variance of general cognitive abilities on expertise varies between studies and domains, results of meta-analyses suggest that the impact of general cognitive ability on success is dependent on the complexity, context, and specificity of the performance demands of the task in which individuals want to succeed and develop expertise [19; 23], meaning that general cognitive abilities become more important as the complexity of the task increases. Following this argumentation, high-quality refereeing should at least be partly related to general cognitive ability because refereeing can be described as highly complex, including various tasks and requiring continuous adaptation of the referees to the changing dynamics of the game [24]. So far, only a few studies in sport psychology have investigated the relationship between general cognitive abilities and expertise in referees, and those studies that did, reported differing results [11; 24]. Furthermore, studies investigating referees encounter various challenges that might contribute to the heterogenous results [11]. Firstly, research in sports psychology is mainly conducted with athletes, and the available data concerning referees is much smaller [25]. Secondly, in most sports, the pool of professional referees' officiating top-level games is small [26]. Thirdly, [PERSON] et al. [11] reported an absence of an adequate control group in most studies investigating cognitive abilities in referees. Lastly, it is essential to accurately determine which areas of general cognitive abilities (for example, attention, concentration, abstraction, perception, etc.) could theoretically enhance performance in tasks; however, in refereeing, there are multiple tasks a referee must fulfil in a game (e.g., making accurate decisions, retaining the game's flow, and controlling the game) [24]. Therefore, selecting the proper tests to assess important cognitive abilities for refereeing is challenging. The current study aims to address these challenges by examining a sufficient sample size (via cooperation with the German basketball federation), adding a control group, and focusing on only one area of general cognitive ability. The area we assessed in this study is visual-cognitive ability because referees' performance is primarily determined by the accuracy of their decisions, and referees primarily base their in-game decisions on the visual information they receive [27]. Furthermore, numerous studies have reported significant effects on visual abilities between referees with different expertise and sport-specific tasks (among others, anticipation [12], gaze behaviour [9], and recall capacity [4]). Thus, this study aims to investigate whether similar effects can be found between refereeswith different expertise for the same abilities but in general cognitive tests. Based on studies that have found significant expertise effects of sport-specific abilities in referees, we assessed the following general visual-cognitive abilities [3; 4; 8; 16; 28]. All of these constructs involve processing information by the visual system in order to make predictions about the environment and determine behavior [28]. (1) The capacity of the spatial working memory: The capacity of individuals to store and access perceived stimuli in the spatial working memory is limited and individually varies. In practice, a referee with more capacity would have more information about a situation. Significant effects in sport-specific tasks were reported by [PERSON] et al. [8] and [PERSON] et al. [4]. (2) Visual orientation: In sports, referees must often evaluate spatially crowded and chaotic situations. Visual orientation, meaning the ability to distinguish single details of different stimuli close to each other, is, thus, critical. Significant effects in sport-specific tasks were reported by [PERSON] et al. [29]. (3) Perceptual speed: In addition to the accurate perception of stimuli, it is also relevant for referees to process stimuli quickly and maintain the game's flow [1].