Decision Making Performance due to Exercise Intensity and Arousal

Objective: The aim of this study is to investigate the effect of different levels of exercise intensity and arousal has on the speed and the accuracy of decision making among expert female soccer players.
Methods: Sixteen expert female soccer players with at least 8 years of competitive background were selected voluntarily participate in this study. Soccer experiment images were displayed on a screen where the participants had to choose a response from three options (shoot, pass, and dribble) in order to assess the decision making the performance. The test experiments were designed in three arousal and three exercise intensity levels. In order to examine any significant effect of the levels of different situations, a One-Way ANOVA with Repeated Measures was performed to find the effects of mentioned variables on the accuracy and the speed of decision making.
Results: The results obtained from the present study did not reveal any significant effect of the level of arousal on the speed of decision making (p>0.05). The accuracy of decision making, however, was significantly affected by the exercise intensity (p<0.05). With increasing the exercise intensity, the players’ speed of decision making showed an improvement with no spectators and the presence of inactive spectators at different levels of arousal. It was only at the exercise intensity level of 80% max HR that the best accuracy of decision making was observed at the presence of inactive spectators.
Conclusion: The present findings suggest that the level of arousal and the exercise intensity affect each of the decision-making components separately.