## 4 Discussion
As explained in Section 1, we chose to do this as our main interest was to understand the rudimentary attentional mechanisms involved in the given task, without any influences from strategies and other skills that experienced goalkeepers may have developed to carry it out. Of course, a logical next step for future research is to extend this study by including goalkeepers with different levels of experience to determine whether the attentional processes identified here contribute markedly to their efficient performance when experts carry out the task. Yet, our current findings highlight the significance of distinct attentional abilities for intercepting fast-approaching balls efficiently. This suggests that aspiring new goalkeepers may be either evaluated on the level of their attentional skills or focus on improving them through mental training. That said, new training studies should also examine whether potential benefits from the training of cognitive skills in the lab transfer to the real world (i.e., to goalkeeping performance in the field), by documenting gains in actual player performance. Immersive VR technology may provide the means for designing novel training protocols that simulate more closely the tasks soccer players execute during an actual soccer match (e.g., [10]). For example, the VR environment we used in the current study immersed participants in a realistic soccer pitch in which they could move and act with 6 degrees-of-freedom. Although training basic cognitive skills such as different aspects of attention may not require that the environment and the task used resembles visually the one of interest (i.e., a non-soccer task that tops on alerting may be just as efficient as one that does), immersing participants in a virtual environment has important advantages (see [54] for an overview of benefits and considerations for designing VR tasks). First, it allows participants to process information in egocentric (self-to-object) coordinates as in the real world, unlike the screen-based tasks that can only be carried out based on allocentric (i.e., object-to-object information) coordinates. That is, in the VR Goalkeeper task we used, a goalkeeper may process information relating to the direction of the ball relative to his/her own body position in space and update that information during the approach of the ball before executing a response. A screen-based version of such task would pose quite different demands. The participant would act as an external observer and rely on the processing of object-to-object relations, e.g., compute and update the spatial relation between two objects in space: the ball and the goalkeeper. Therefore, compared to screen-based tasks, the demands of the immersive VR task are closer to those of actual goalkeeping on the pitch. As a result, using VR, one could reproduce realistic settings in the laboratory to study variables that are difficult to examine on the pitch. For example, the authors of [9] used immersive VR to obtain a detailed analysis of goalkeeper hand movements when responding to curved balls. Second, unlike screen-based tasks, immersive VR tasks allow the execution of natural movements for responding. In our task, for example, participants blocked the balls by moving their arms towards the ball just like a goalkeeper does in an actual soccer game. The closer correspondence of the response mediums in the laboratory and the real-world tasks reduces the possibility of different cognitive mechanisms recruited by different motor demands (see [55] for a discussion). Indeed, findings suggesting that the lack of immersion and natural motor responses may alter the nature of a goalkeeping task are provided by an eye-tracking study from [56]. In this study, goalkeepers faced penalty kicks under different conditions that manipulated whether the task was carried out in situ or as a video simulation and whether responding was by interception (i.e., by carrying out dives onto a mat) or other means (by moving a joystick or providing verbal responses).