Movement synchronization in complex and dynamic team coordination

Abstract

Mutual anticipation of teammates' actions enables efficient coordination that achieves a common goal and high performance. In team sports involving direct competition, such implicit and nonverbal interactions within short periods are required. If players begin moving after observing their teammates, gaps may emerge, allowing opponents to interfere. When mutual anticipation functions appropriately, players' interactions are smooth without gaps, and their movements are expected to become synchronized. Synchronization represents a temporally stable structure whose mechanisms have been examined. However, few studies have investigated synchronization in complex and dynamic real-world coordination involving heterogeneous roles and evolving interactions within short periods. The examinations have been essentially limited to determining whether there are statistical differences from a baseline. In our approach, we utilized team sports and introduced a statistical method to provide detailed probabilistic evaluations of these differences. The purpose of this study was to extract the temporal components of movement using 3-on-3 basketball. In a field experiment investigating offensive coordination, we calculated the relative phases in which players approached or moved away from their teammates during mini-games. The frequency distributions were estimated using Bayesian inference and compared before and after receiving advice from the coach. The results showed that the posterior probabilities that the frequencies in synchronization-related bins were higher after the advice than before the advice were 70\% or higher. As a pilot study, these findings may provide a first step toward understanding coordination processes related to mutual anticipation based on a common ground of team strategy.

arXiv comment9 pages, 6 figures, 1 table, for dataset file, see https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/BEPSM