# The Relevance of General Spatial Anticipation Skills for Basketball Referees
## 4 Discussion  
The current study investigated the performance of basketball referees with different expertise levels in various general visual-cognitive abilities. Only in spatial anticipation did elite referees perform significantly better than amateurs and novices. Besides that, there were no significant differences in performance between groups on the other tests. However, a trend emerged that in all visual-cognitive skills (descriptively judged by the mean test scores of the groups), novices performed best, elite referees second best, and amateur referees third best (except for spatial anticipation). In general, the results of this study fit into the mixed findings of previous studies that have investigated general cognitive abilities in referees [11; 12; 13; 14; 15]. Our findings indicate that elite referees do not possess superior visual-cognitive abilities per se. However, the results regarding spatial anticipation suggest that the ability to anticipate movement is a possible exception, which might indicate that spatial anticipation is an essential skill to become an elite referee. We assumed that educational level and younger age would positively correlate with the test scores in all visual tests [34]. However, the correlations between educational level and test results can be described as low. This can be partly explained by the very high educational level (70.9% had a university degree) of the overall sample and the low age range within the sample. While these correlations provide some information about the relationship between visual-cognitive abilities and refereeing, they do not offer much insight into the importance of specific abilities in refereeing. In contrast, the significant effect found in spatial anticipation tasks does provide such information. The significance of anticipation skills in refereeing is not a novelty; numerous studies have reported the relevance of various domain-specific anticipatory skills for good referee performance [28; 32; 39]. However, our results further indicate a deeper meaning of general spatial anticipation for the success of referees, especially when considering the large effect size. Elite referees anticipated the movement of a target object on average 25% more accurately than amateur referees and novices. We assume that this competence of elite referees in spatial anticipation reflects that referees with better general spatial-anticipatory abilities have a higher chance of becoming  
Figure 1: The differences between the three groups are divided by expertise level for spatial anticipation scores. Scores for spatial anticipation are measured in median deviations in millimetres; therefore, lower values on the y-axis reflect better performances. elite referees in basketball. Specifically, it might indicate that referees with better spatial anticipatory skills make, on average, more accurate decisions, leveraging their chances to further their careers more quickly. The question of to what extent this improvement in competence translates into practical benefits for basketball referees is a matter of debate. Future research should investigate the possible practical implications of this finding in a deeper understanding. More precisely, we recommend further bridging this study approach to other groups of referees and discussing how the discrepancies in different sports could also be reflected in discrepancies in referees' skills. Beyond this practical relevance, our results indicate that the required skill set to perform well as a referee may not be limited to only sport-specific anticipatory skills but should be investigated in a broader approach, thus, considering anticipation skills on a general level. However, the question remains about how the elite referees acquired superior general spatial anticipatory skills.