Where and When to Look: How Expertise and Mental Fatigue Shape Visual Exploration in a Football Task

Skillful performance requires picking up information at the righttime to both accurately perform ongoing action and search for subsequent ones. The current experiment aimed to compare the visual exploratory activity (VEA) of skilled (n = 23) and novice (n = 21) players in a football-based dual task scenario that required to manage competing visual demands for ball manipulation and environmental scanning. Skilled players performed the task faster than novices and showed a more proactive VEA: they spent moretime looking at cues related to future passing opportunities while novices looked more at cues related to ball reception. In addition, skilled players made longer scanning movements before receiving the ball, but they did not perform significantly more head movements than novices. Under mental fatigue, skilled participants preserved their VEA patterns but required longer visual fixations, suggesting a reduced rate of information processing. These findings suggest that expertise in VEA is characterised by the efficient allocation of visual attention rather than its sheer quantity.