“It will never come as a shock”: exploring how staff members experience and perceive the player release process from professional football academies

This article sought to adapt and validate an instrument for the perception of management policies and practices aimed at higher education professors, since the available instruments were designed for organisations in general and do not address the particularities of academic work. The instrument was based on two scales already validated for Brazilian organisations, with the addition of items on research incentives, publication support and the teaching career. Content and criterion validity derived from the published origin of the items, complemented by prior definition of the constructs, peer review and pre-testing. A total of 386 professors from Brazilian public and private institutions took part, answering on an interval scale based on adverbs of quantity and frequency. Internal consistency reached a Cronbach's alpha of 0.956. Exploratory factor analysis, used for the statistical validation of the constructs defined a priori, retained six factors explaining 67.3% of the accumulated variance, with a sampling adequacy of 0.948. The expected dimensions were reproduced, and the added items formed a factor of their own. It is concluded that the adapted instrument is suitable for measuring teachers' perception of institutional management.

Perceptual expertise is widely assumed to refine multisensory perception, yet the empirical literature appears inconsistent. Trained musicians show narrower audiovisual temporal integration windows and quicker segregation, whereas experienced wine tasters seem more influenced by a wine's color in their aroma and flavor judgments than novices are. We argue that the inconsistency arises from a conflation of two formally distinct quantities: the prior probability that concurrent signals arise from a common source, and the coupling between the values of signals that share one. We present a generative model in which both are free parameters, along with channel precision and a decision criterion, that contains causal-inference and coupling-prior models as special cases. The model shows that the correlation between the values of two signals across an environment reflects only the product of the two priors, so that a correlation-tracking learner acquires the coupling when the signals always share a source, whereas separating the two priors requires representing causal structure; that binary common-source reports confound the common-cause prior with the decision criterion; that the coupling trades off against the measurement noise of the influencing channel unless its precision is measured independently; and that the two priors leave distinct signatures in how cross-modal influence varies with disparity. When the source is fixed, as for the color and odor of a wine, tighter coupling alone produces the conjunction of greater displacement by color and better discrimination between wines reported for experienced tasters, which no change in odor precision can produce. Simulations of a test battery combining continuous estimates, common-source reports and discrimination thresholds show that the parameters can be recovered, that a within-subject dissociation can be detected with conventional sample sizes under illustrative effect sizes, and that recovery fails in certain cases. The account yields a rule classifying environments by their base rate of common causation and their coupling strength, and the same ambiguity attends claims about altered multisensory processing in autism and aging. We also show that the most cited demonstration of expert susceptibility to color contains no expertise manipulation, and suggest that apparent expert biases may reflectwind calibration to real-world statistics.

Introduction Anticipating an opponent's actions is central to performance in team sports such as soccer, where a player must select the correct response within a fraction of a second. Perceptual-cognitive expertise in anticipation is well documented, but standard measures (response time, accuracy, or option choice) capture only the discrete response produced at a single moment and leave the preparatory processing that precedes it unobserved. Building on evidence that hand and cursor movements reveal cognition as it unfolds, the present study examined, as a proof of concept, whether continuous cursor tracking can read out the pre-response preparatory state in a sports anticipation task. Methods Twelve skilled soccer players and twelve novices watched soccer pass-course clips and anticipated which teammate would receive the ball by moving a cursor; the video was stopped at the final frame (the moment a response was required), and the same clips were repeated across three blocks. Two continuous measures were defined: the cursor's Euclidean distance to the correct receiver at response onset (a spatial index of where the participant was poised) and the increase in cursor velocity in the window immediately before response onset (a temporal index of the movement toward the response). Results Compared with novices, skilled players anticipated more accurately, were poised closer to the correct receiver, and showed a larger velocity increase; control analyses argued against the velocity difference being a by-product of the total amount of movement. In an exploratory analysis, the positional difference emerged across repeated presentations of the same clips and was largest in the final block. In addition, the velocity difference was already present in the first presentation, and no significant change across repeated presentations was detected. Discussion The pre-response preparatory state is observed in both a spatial aspect (where one is poised) and a temporal aspect (how one moves toward the response). Because in basic reaching research the position and the velocity of movement index different aspects of decision-making, capturing both under a single continuous measure (which discrete responses cannot) provides a basis for measuring the decision-making processes that underlie anticipation in sport.

The study aimed to find whether differences exist in the perspective of teachers towards online learning when grouped according to profile. Specifically, the study endeavored to describe the profile of the respondents in terms of age, gender, civil status, and educational attainment; determine the extent of teachers’ perspective towards online learning in the areas of access, interaction, response, and results; ascertain the level of teachers’ preparedness towards online learning in teaching social studies; and find out whether a significant difference exists in the preparedness of teachers towards online learning when grouped according to age, gender, civil status, and educational attainment. The study was conducted among the national high schools in the Division of Malaybalay City, Bukidnon for the School Year 2020-2021. A total of 96 Social Studies teachers were drawn from (6) national schools through purposive sampling. To gather relevant information needed for the study, the researcher adopted the questionnaire developed by Larsen (2012) and Lichoro (2015). Descriptive statistics such as frequency, percentage, mean, standard deviation, t-test, and analysis of variance were used to treat the data. The majority of the teachers were in middle adulthood and were predominantly female. It is further revealed that most of them were single and bachelor’s degree holders. Access and interaction were observed in great extent, while responses and results were demonstrated in moderate extent, suggesting that the teachers’ perspective towards online learning showed certainty in the way they take online learning as a learning platform in this pandemic period. Similarly, teachers’ preparedness towards online learning yielded positive results in all indicators, implying that teachers consider online learning as a powerful tool for them to teach and support the learning of the students in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. There was a significant difference in the preparedness of teachers when they were grouped according to age, where younger teachers are construed to be ready for this kind of learning delivery, while sex, civil status, and educational attainment did not show significant differences. This means that regardless of their characteristics in these three variables, their preparedness for online learning is the same. Thus, school administrators have to consider teachers to acquire new skills, sharpen existing ones, perform better, increase productivity and be better teachers in this new way of approaching learning.

This study examined whether an 8-week progressive temporal-occlusion training program improves early anticipation of forehand drop-shot direction in badminton. Seventy-eight university students with systematic badminton training experience were randomly assigned to a progressive temporal-occlusion group, a full-information active-control group, or a regular-activity control group ( n = 26 per group); 72 completed both pretest and posttest. The two video-training groups trained twice weekly for 8 weeks. Anticipation was assessed at four occlusion points: 80 ms before racket–shuttle contact, 40 ms before contact, at contact, and 40 ms after contact. Shot-direction anticipation accuracy was the primary performance measure, and correct-response reaction time (RT) was the secondary measure. Data were analyzed using mixed repeated-measures ANOVA, planned comparisons, and trial-level sensitivity analyses. Accuracy showed a significant group × test-session interaction ( p < 0.001), whereas the group × test-session × occlusion-point interaction was not significant ( p = 0.185). Relative to the active-control group, the progressive group showed larger accuracy gains at 40 ms before contact and at contact (Holm-adjusted p = 0.048 and 0.009, respectively). For correct-response RT, the three-way interaction was significant ( p < 0.001), with larger reductions in the progressive group at 80 ms before contact, 40 ms before contact, and at contact (all Holm-adjusted p = 0.013). Thus, the progressive temporal-occlusion training program produced additional improvements in selected anticipation measures beyond those obtained with dose-matched full-information video practice. The additional accuracy gains were observed at 40 ms before contact and at contact, whereas additional RT reductions extended from 80 ms before contact to contact. Because the three-way interaction for accuracy was not significant, the apparent temporal specificity of the accuracy gains should be interpreted cautiously.