It is well reported that expert athletes have refined perceptual-cognitive skills and fixate on more informative areasduring representative tasks. These perceptual-cognitive skills are also crucial to performance within the domain ofsports officials. We examined the visual scan patterns of elite and sub-elite association football referees whileassessing foul play situations. These foul play situations (open play and corner kick situations) were presented on aTobii T120 Eye Tracking monitor. The elite referees made more accurate decisions and differences in their visualsearch behaviors were observed. For the open play situations, referees in the elite group spent significantly moretime fixating the most informative area of the attacking player (contact zone) and less time fixating the body partthat was not involved in the infringement (non-contact zone). Furthermore, the average total fixation time in thecontact zone and non-contact zone tended to differ between the elite and sub-elite referees in corner kicksituations. In conclusion, elite level referees have learned to discern relevant from less-relevant information in thesame way as expert athletes. Findings have implications for the development of perceptual training programs forsport officials.
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