Influence of Refereeing Experience on the Decision-Making Process of Football Referees: In the View of Neuromanagement

Experience factors often play a key role in decision-making activities. As a kind of third-party decision-making, football refereeing decision is rarely explored from the neurocognitive process to explore the influence of decision-making experience. A decision-making task was designed based on real football match scenarios. Using the event-related potential (ERP) technique, the difference of individuals' decision-making and EEG in foul action was compared under different experience levels. The experiment showed that the amplitudes of N1 and P300 induced by individuals with different experience levels were significantly different when they were doing the punishment decision task, which proved that experience factors found in the two stages, the target suspected foul behavior and whether the behavior of the foul, influenced referees' decision-making. Compared with other subjects, the experienced referee consumed less cognitive resources when making decisions with the low N1 amplitude, and less consumption of decision-making resources compared with control group, which showed a low P300 amplitude.