International Journal of Developmental Science 10 (2016) 73–84
DOI 10.3233/DEV-160185
IOS Press
On Being in the Wrong Place: The Role
of Children’s Conceptual Understanding
and Ballgame Experience when Judging
a Football Player’s Offside Position
Christiane Lange-Küttnera,∗ and Giorgia Boscob
a London
Metropolitan University, UK
of Turin, Italy
b University
Abstract
We investigated the role of children’s conceptual understanding and ballgame experience when judging whether a football player is in an
offside position, or not. In the offside position, a player takes advantage of being behind the defence line of the opposing team and just
waits for the ball to arrive in order to score a goal. We explained the offside rule to 7- and 9-year-old children with a Subbuteo setup. They
produced drawings of an offside position until it was correct (drawing to criterion). Thereafter, children judged whether a designated player
was in an offside position in a computerized task. Like adults, also children found it easier to judge when a player was in a wrong rather
than a right place. Only when including frequency of ballgame practice in the analysis it was revealed that boys were better independently
of age as they judged the offside position more systematically.
Keywords
Wrong place, offside position, game rules, spatial concepts, ball game playing experience
Football, which is called soccer in the US, is a
favourite outdoors rule-based game (Christidou et al.,
2013). Not only young men (Helsen et al., 1998),
also women (Beaudoin, 2006; Lopez, 1997; Scraton et al., 1999) and children love playing football.
While for boys, but not girls, becoming a professional
footballer is a top choice (Looft, 1971), a ballgame
pitch is depicted by all children independently of their
sex when asked to draw their schoolyard (Christidou
et al., 2013). Moreover, in recent months, the British
Football Association (FA) has created multiple initiatives to recruit and develop female football talent
(FA, 2016b). Football is often seen as a team activity that fosters social cohesion (Smyth & Anderson,
∗ Address
for correspondence
Dr. Chris Lange-Küttner, London Metropolitan University, School
of Psychology, 166-220 Holloway Road, London N7 8DB, England, UK. Tel.: +44 20 8808 1691 or +44 20 7133 2698; E-mail:
c.langekuettner@londonmet.ac.uk
2001; Watson & Gibson, 1980) even when children
are not players, but just football supporters (Spaaij &
Anderson, 2010).
Judging the Offside Position
The current study investigates children’s understanding of the offside-rule in football (FIFA, 2015/16, Law
11, pp. 36, 99, 102, 110–118). The offside rule is special as it forbids a player to take an unfair advantage
by scoring a goal from a place behind the ‘enemy’
line where the defence of the opposing team is circumvented. If a footballer scores from such a wrong
offside place, the resulting goal would be disallowed
and would not count. Hence, we trained 7- and 9-yearold children in the offside rule and thereafter tested
their judgment of the offside rule by asking them to
identify whether a player is in this wrong kind of place.
ISSN ISSN 2192-001X/16/$35.00 © 2016 – IOS Press and the authors. All rights reserved
This article is published online with Open Access and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (CC BY-NC 4.0).
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C. Lange-Küttner and G. Bosco / Experience, Concepts, and the Off-Side Position
While research on the offside rule has been carried out
with adults (e.g. Gilis et al., 2008; Ogilvie, 2000), this
current study tests for the first time whether children
can already understand the offside rule.
There is currently more research about adults and
referees than children judging the offside position.
Studies of real football games found a substantial
amount of error obtained from live videos: In the evaluations of 200 national and world cup games, of 305
erroneous decisions, 62.2% were flag errors, that is,
there was no offside, but the referee had raised the flag
(false positive). There were 37.7% no-flag errors, that
is, there was a player in an offside position, but the referee did not raise the flag (false negative) (Oudejans
et al., 2000). This seems to be a large number of slips
of attention, however, this proportion varied when just
refereeing decisions in FIFA games were analysed,
and more false positive (86.6%) than false negative
errors (13.4%) occurred (Helsen et al., 2006). That
is, few offside situations escaped the attention of the
referees, but they did blow the whistle more often
than necessary. In the current study, this was tested
by having trials with a designated player who is either
in an offside position (target present), or not (target
absent).
The Development of Spatial Representation
in Children
In short, a football pitch is a spatial expanse where
players need to occupy strategic positions. Different
to current belief, not just the spectators may move
in crowds and can be so noisy that they disturb the
referee’s judgment (Nevill et al., 2002). Also primary
school aged players often move together across the
pitch as if in a swarm which means that they cannot
pass the ball towards different points on the pitch. To
understand strategic positioning in the field, children
need a cognitive understanding of projective space to
grasp that playing in a team does not mean that you
stay physically close - in talking distance - to other
team members, but that you occupy a point in space to
pass the ball across the field into an area where there
is another free-standing team player with few opponents, who then can score from an unexpected angle.
Piaget and Inhelder (1956) regarded empty space as a
core notion for the understanding of spatial expanses
because it involves ‘decentration’ from figures which
occupy space (Lange-Küttner & Reith, 1995).
Proximity is part of an early topological concept
that conceptualizes space as neighbourhoods of figures, while terms such as distance and angle are part
of the more advanced Euclidean concept of space.
Only from about age six, children represent spatial fields with spatial axes, boundaries and vectors
(Lange-Küttner, 2009, 2014). Because the development from a ground line with lined-up figures to an
area where figures are distributed in the field varies
considerably in children, we used a ready-made half
of a football field (Lange-Küttner, 2004, 2009), see
Figure 1 right, where children just had to draw the
figures, but not the spatial field as such.
Young children may also draw players as tall as
the whole ballgame field. The only reason for young
children to reduce a players’ size in a drawing is if
more figures on the page use up space and hence
they need to be shrunk (Lange-Küttner, 1997, 2004).
However, 11-year-olds often draw top-down views
and draw players particularly small (Lange-Küttner,
Figure 1. Left: Subbuteo game, Right: Drawing Sheet. The Subbuteo game was used to explain the offside rule to 7- and 9-year-old children.
Children were drawing the offside position with pin men as often as required until they could create a correct depiction of the offside position.
Achieving a correct drawing of the offside position was the criterion to be admitted to the offside rule computer task.
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C. Lange-Küttner and G. Bosco / Experience, Concepts, and the Off-Side Position
Figure 2. This drawing (reprinted with kind permission of FIFA, 2015/16, p. 77) shows broken lines which are not part of the playing field
boundaries. Instead, they are imaginary projective lines that need to be made by the linesmen in order to be able to judge whether a player
is before, on, or behind the defence line of the opposing players.
2009). Their representations of players have actually
become very similar to those of FIFA in Figur 2: Players are depicted very small with only shoulders and
head visible. The important aspect is not how they
look or who they are exactly, but where they are standing in the field. Hence, we asked children to only draw
the players as stick (wo)men. This top-down view
is more conducive for offside judgments (Ogilvie,
2000) than the natural view of a referee (Oudejans
et al., 2000).
In order to judge whether a player is in an offside
position, linesmen have to create an imaginary spatial
axes for the defence line-up of players of the attacked
team. This line is imaginary and dynamic because it
can briefly emerge and quickly disappear when the
defending players align differently by running into
other places in the field. In Figure 2, these projective
lines are depicted in orange.
We explained the rule with a red thread in a threedimensional Subbuteo setup (Figure 1, left) and tested
children’s understanding of the offside position using
a two-dimensional spatial field depiction (Figure 1,
right). Children were drawing two teams with one
football player in an offside position, until the offside
position was correctly depicted. They had to achieve
this as a learning criterion for being admitted to an
offside-rule computer task. Also adults improve their
offside position judgement with web-based training,
whether on video from real-life scenes or drawings
(Put et al., 2015), and both methods improved offside
position judgment accuracy to the same degree.
International Journal of Developmental Science 1-2/2016, 73–84
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The Current Study
The UK Football Association (FA) has a mini-soccer
league and has published the FA Laws for MiniSoccer (FA, 2016a). A referee for the mini-soccer
league can train from age 14. The Laws for MiniSoccer apply to children under ten years. There are
several modifications to the adult game. For instance,
there must be at least seven players in each team
and the playing time should not exceed 60 minutes.
To protect young children from becoming too competitive, there is no published league table and only
three trophy events. However, fouls and misconduct
are sanctioned like in adult games with free kicks
and penalty kicks. There is no offside-rule in place.
Hence, in the current study we investigated whether
already 7- and 9-year-old children can understand
and apply the offside rule when they are identifying whether a player is in a wrong place in a football
field - even though they could not have had any formal
teaching. Instead, we provided children this age with
C. Lange-Küttner and G. Bosco / Experience, Concepts, and the Off-Side Position
Figure 3. Top. FIFA playing field drawing (reprinted with kind permission of FIFA, 2015/16, p. 112). In the FIFA playing field, the offside
player (A) in a white shirt stands behind the goal keeper (GK) and the light green (or light grey) players who are his opponents. The player
A is in an offside position because he is played at (the arrow), but not if the ball would have gone straight into the goal, passing him by. In
this case the arrow would have pointed into the goal, not at the player. Bottom. Offside Reaction Time Computer task. We adopted the arrow
that points towards a player who may or may not be in an offside position. Children should either touch an offside player on the screen (48
trials), or touch the centre circle if there was no offside position (48 trials).
some training using a Subbuteo game to introduce
them to the offside-rule.
We created a computerized offside position identification task similar in appearance to visual search
tasks that assess the identification of a unique target amongst distracters (e.g. Donnelly et al., 2007;
Remington et al., 2014; Woods et al., 2013; Zare &
Nahravanian, 2014, see Fig. 3). However, our task
differs from visual search tasks insofar as the target player is easily recognizable because an arrow is
pointing towards the footballer. Hence, the score was
not given for finding a unique object like in a visual
search task, but for identifying whether an indicated
player was in a wrong place, that is, in an offside position. We predicted that reaction times in this two-step
process would be longer compared to visual search
tasks.
We expected to see a developmental progression
towards more successful identification of the offside position in 7- and 9-year-old children because
many changes occur at the same time in their spatial
cognition (Lange-Küttner & Green, 2007). Children become much better in remembering locations
because they can keep track of complex spatial configurations over time (Lange-Küttner, 2010a, 2010b,
2013; Uttal et al., 2013) and they begin to represent
spatial fields in their drawings (Lange-Küttner, 1997,
2004, 2009).
We also expected gender differences to emerge
because boys appear to be especially good in scanning
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C. Lange-Küttner and G. Bosco / Experience, Concepts, and the Off-Side Position
The study was approved by the departmental Ethics
committee. Children’s parents were informed about
the aim of the research and signed a consent form
to allow their children to participate. Children could
withdraw from the experiment at any point in time.
The children were individually tested in a quiet
classroom in the morning and early afternoon (Atkinson & Reilly, 2012). Children first answered a
questionnaire asking them if they played, liked and
watched ballgames and how often. Thereafter, the
second author explained the offside rule using a
script. She demonstrated the offside-rule with the
table game Subbuteo (see Figure 2). It was explained
to each child that a player is in an offside position
when (1) the player is in the opposing team’s half of
the football field, (2) nearer the opponents’ goal line
than the ball and the second last opponent, and is (3)
touching the ball in action (FIFA, 2014, p. 108). The
experimenter used a red thread to show the ‘enemy’
line behind which an offside player would need to
be while waiting for the ball to come and explained
that this is an imaginary line created by the line-up of
players. Then demonstrations were given using the
two teams of the Subbuteo game.
As soon as the explanation of the offside rule was
completed, she asked the children to draw the offside position. Children drew three players of each
team, the goalie for the one half-field and the referee.
They were required to use four pencils: red for the
defending team, green for the attacking team, black
for the referee and purple for the goalkeeper. Children were allowed to just draw pin men because only
their spatial positions in the field were important, but
not their appearance as a figure. If the drawing was
correct, the child continued with the next part of the
study, the computerized experiment. If the drawing
was not correct, the experimenter repeated the explanation and the child produced another drawing, and
so on until the child had correctly illustrated the rule.
When a child had correctly illustrated the offside
position, we assumed that he/she properly understood
the rule (learning criterion), and we proceeded with
the offside position judgment task. The task was presented on a Toshiba Portégé laptop, with an Intel
Core i5 processor and a 12.1 inch (diagonal) touch
screen, operating system Windows 7. The task was
programmed using E-prime software (Psychology
Software Tools, 2015). In the task the colours of the
two teams were green and red, and the football field
was black and white (see grey-scale Figure 3, bottom). We showed the football players in a bird-view
perspective. The player in question was denoted with
an arrow, and it was explained that the ball was about
to be passed towards this very player.
Halfway through the task, the two teams switched
the side of the field like in a real match. In 50% of the
trials for each team the player was not in an offside
position, and in 50% of the trials the designated player
was in an offside position. There were 100 trials in
total. Children first performed four practice trials, two
for each team, one with and one without an offside
position, followed by the remaining 96 trials. If the
player was in an offside position, children touched
International Journal of Developmental Science 1-2/2016, 73–84
77
displays from an early age (Wilcox et al., 2012).
Moreover, we controlled for underlying factors such
as the experience with ballgames with a questionnaire. We assumed that children’s practice was
important because the gradual detachment of visual
attention from figures in favour of places can be
acquired without spatial concepts just by repeated
visual experience (Lange-Küttner & Küttner, 2015).
Method
Design
Identification of the offside and non-offside position
was the dependent variable, assessed with repeated
measures. The necessary sample size to test the
main hypothesis that the older age group should be
better able to identify the offside position was computed according to a 2 (age) by 2 (gender) factorial
design = 4 × 5 (minimum cell frequency) = 20 participants. The current sample is larger because the data
collection was only stopped when all parent consent
forms had been used.
Participants
Children were recruited in a primary school in the
City of London. Thirty-five children were tested, but
one girl dropped out during the training phase, and
there was one incomplete data set. The remaining
sample N = 33 consisted of two age groups (years;
months), a younger (n = 16, 7 girls and 9 boys,
M = 7;5, SD = 3 months, range 85 to 94 months) and
an older age group (n = 17, 6 girls and 11 boys,
M = 9;5, SD = 5 months, range 105 to 118 months).
According to their mean age, these age groups are
labelled 7-year-olds and 9-year-olds.
Materials and Procedure
C. Lange-Küttner and G. Bosco / Experience, Concepts, and the Off-Side Position
the player on the screen with their index finger. If
children judged that the player was not in an offside
position, they touched the centre circle in the playing
field see Figure 3 bottom. There was no time limit on
children’s responses. Once a child had touched the
screen for a response, the next screen appeared.
Data Generation
We counted the numbers of drawings until the children reached the learning criterion. In total, there
were 1,584 trials for the offside and 1,584 non-offside
trials in the raw data sheet (33 participants by 48 test
trials = 1,584 trials by 2 trials types = 3,168 trials).
For accuracy, we calculated the mean accuracy in per
cent and reaction times in milliseconds.
Results
Children answered the questions asking them if they
played, liked and watched ballgames and how often
as follows: 90.9% of the children answered that they
liked ballgames while 9.1% preferred other types of
sports, and 87.9% of the children said that they would
watch football games. Children reported that they
played on average four different types of ballgames
(M = 3.65, SD = 2.38; range 1–10).
Children answered to the question about how often
they played a ball game “more often than 3-4 times
a week” (42.4%), “1-2 times a week” (39.4%) and
“less than 2 times a month” (18.2%). There was
a significant effect of sex on this variable, χ2 (2,
N = 33) = 8.80, p = 0.012. Girls played more often just
1-2 ballgames per month (girls: 38.5%, boys: 5%),
while boys more often played more than 3 ballgames
per week (girls: 15.4%, boys: 60.0%), but about a
comparable percentage of boys and girls played 1-2
ballgames per week (girls: 46.2%, boys: 35.0%), see
Figure 4. Thus, there were more boys than girls in the
sample who were very experienced in ballgames.
Figure 4. Sex differences in experience playing ballgames in 7and 9-year-old children: Boys play ballgames more often than girls.
Frequencies add up to 100% per gender.
Offside Position Judgment Task: Accuracy
Two thirds of the sample needed two drawings
(66.7%), three children needed one drawing (9.1%),
but eight children needed three (15.2%) and four
drawings (9.1%). Chi-square analyses showed no significant difference between boys and girls, p = 0.163,
or age groups, p = 0.095. The latter may have reached
significance if there was a larger sample involved.
A 2 (offside/non offside) by 2 (age) by 2 (gender)
ANOVA with repeated measures for offside vs. nonoffside trials was computed. Table 1 shows the group
means and standard deviations for offside and the
non-offside trials by age and gender. A main effect of
the offside position trials was found, F(1, 33) = 7.47,
p = 0.011, η2 = 0.21. Children showed significantly
higher accuracy when recognizing an offside position
(M = 71.6%) than judging that the player was not in an
offside position (M = 62.6%). No other effect reached
significance, ps > 0.068, see Table A1 (Appendix).
When the analysis was controlled with the number of drawings needed to graphically represent the
offside position (learning criterion) as a covariate,
the main effect of the difference between offside and
non-offside judgments was no longer significant, F(1,
33) = 0.054, p = 0.818, η2 = 0.00. This showed that the
point when during the Subbuteo training the children
had drawn a correct spatial configuration of an offside
position also later showed in their ability to recognize
an offside position better than a non-offside position
in the computerized visual task. The learning criterion
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Learning the Rule in the Subbuteo Setup
C. Lange-Küttner and G. Bosco / Experience, Concepts, and the Off-Side Position
Table 1
Group Means for Accuracy and Reaction Times in Offside Rule Decision Making
Age
Group
7 years
9 years
Total
Sex
Girls
Boys
Total
Girls
Boys
Total
Girls
Boys
Total
Offside Trials
Accuracy (%)
65.47
55.56
59.89
59.03
70.46
66.43
62.50
63.75
63.26
(19.97)
(16.93)
(18.39)
(11.53)
(19.01)
(17.29)
(16.31)
(19.20)
(17.86)
RT (ms)
8850
6324
7429
3791
4297
4118
6515
5209
5724
(3559)
(3351)
(3568)
(859)
(569)
(703)
(3679)
(2443)
(3006)
Non-Offside Trials
Accuracy (%)
61.61
69.20
65.88
68.43
87.32
80.65
64.76
79.16
73.49
(21.76)
(11.63)
(16.63)
(13.65)
(11.04)
(14.86)
(18.08)
(14.37)
(17.21)
8550
6691
7504
3647
4144
3969
6287
5290
5683
RT (ms)
(4369)
(3590)
(3926)
(834)
(508)
(662)
(4038)
(2693)
(3266)
Note. Standard Deviations are in brackets.
Figure 5. Only when the amount of ballgame experience was considered it showed that boys were better in making correct decisions
about offside positions of designated players than girls, independently of age. Note. * = p < 0.05; ** = p < 0.01.
completely explained how well the positive offside
position identification could be identified as the effect
size was reduced from 0.21 to zero.
When instead the analysis was controlled for
children’s ballgame experience as covariate, both
the significance of the offside position effect, F(1,
33) = 8.42, p = 0.007, η2 = 0.23, and the offside position by gender effect interaction were significant,
F(2, 33) = 6.75, p = 0.015, η2 = 0.19, see Figure 5.
Post-hoc pairwise t-tests (95% confidence interval)
showed that in girls, the difference between offside
(M = 64.7%) and non-offside position (M = 62.5%)
judgment was not significant, t(12) = –0.36, p = 0.728
(7 years p = 0.716; 9 years p = 0.234). In contrast, the
difference between offside (M = 79.1%) and the nonoffside position (M = 63.7%) judgment was highly
significant in boys, t(19) = –4.65, p < 0.001 (7 years
p = 0.034; 9 years p = 0.003).
We also tested the scores of the complete sample as
well as of boys and girls separately with one-sample ttests (two-tailed) to show whether performance levels
were significantly above the chance level of 50% for
both offside and non-offside trials. All tests showed
that the children performed better than chance, ps <
0.001, see Table A3 (Appendix).
Figure 6. Scattergram for the contingency between offside and non-offside position judgment in girls (left, r = 0.11, ns) and boys (right,
r = 0.64∗∗ ).
International Journal of Developmental Science 1-2/2016, 73–84
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The two types of position judgment were not significantly correlated in girls, r = 0.11, p = 0.711, but
they were significantly correlated in boys, r = 0.64,
p = 0.002, see the scattergrams in Figure 6. Those
boys who correctly recognized an offside position of
a player were also more likely to identify when the
player was not position offside, and vice versa. Thus,
judgment of offside and non-offside positions in boys
was more likely to be systematic than in girls.
In order to control the gender differences for both
understanding (the learning criterion) and the ballgame experience, these were simultaneously entered
as covariates. The offside position by gender interaction remained significant, F(2, 33) = 6.00, p = 0.021,
η2 = 0.18. Thus, the experience of playing a ballgame
on a nearly daily basis in real life was more conducive for boys than our offside rule training with the
Subbuteo football game.
for the significant correlation showed that the slower
the reaction times, the lower the accuracy, that is, no
accuracy-reaction time trade-off could be observed.
Discussion
The same analysis of variance was carried out for
reaction times (see Table 1 for group means and
standard deviations). The statistical effects are listed
in the Appendix Table A2. A significant age effect,
F(2, 33) = 15.42, p < 0.001, η2 = 0.35, showed that 7year-olds decided much slower (M = 7604 ms) than
9-year-olds (M = 3970 ms), that is a decrease in reaction times by 191.5%. All other effects were not
significant, ps > 0.218. When both the learning criterion and the ballgame experience were entered as
covariates, the age effect was somewhat lowered but
still significant, F(2, 33) = 9.69, p = 0.004, η2 = 0.26.
When inspecting Table 1, we observed that the
standard deviations of the reaction times were smaller
in 9-year-old than in 7-year-old children indicating
that their reaction time scores showed more homogeneity. Hence, the analysis of variance was re-run for
the 9-year-old children only. The interaction of ballgame experience and offside/non-offside trials was
now marginally significant for reaction times, F(2,
33) = 4.51, p = 0.054, η2 = 0.26. Inspection of scatterplots showed that 9-year-old children with the most
practice in ballgames needed at least 3.5 seconds to
decide about the offside position, while less practiced
9-year-olds made more rash decisions.
Correlations (two-tailed) between accuracy and
reaction times for the offside position identification
were r = –0.47, p = 0.005 (girls r = –0.46, p = 0.116;
boys r = –0.41, p = 0.075), and for the non-offside
position r = 0.00, p = 0.991 (girls r = –0.19, p = 0.542;
boys r = 0.16, p = 0.490). Inspection of the scatterplot
This is the first study that investigates understanding
of the offside position rule in children and does so
with a new computerized task. It is a paradigm where
a social rule (you should not take an unfair advantage) is applied to a spatial configuration of players
in the football field. On the one hand, the offside rule
of football forbids to send a spy behind the defence
line who then carries out an operation where the
success is only the result of circumventing the opposing team that tries to defend their half of the spatial
field. But on the other hand, there is the offside trap
where defence players isolate a striker and build up
a defence line behind this attacker (from the view of
the goalie) so that the striker finds himself in a wrong
and illegitimate position without actually having had
the intention to short-cut the defence. This strategic
move was already mentioned by a 9-year-old boy.
Children showed higher accuracy when recognizing an offside position than when the player was not
in an offside position, similar to adult FIFA referees (Helsen et al., 2006). Seven-year-olds’ judgments
were much slower (M = 7604 ms) than in 9-year-olds
(M = 3970 ms). However, in both age groups, these
reaction times are relatively slow (Lange-Küttner,
2012). They were longer than in visual search tasks
where children between 6 and 12 years do not have
reaction times above 3000 ms (Darby et al., 2014;
Merrill & Conners, 2013). We presume that this may
be the case because in order to think about the location of a figure’s place, the particular figure needs to
be ignored, while in a visual search task, the target
is an outlier figure that just needs to attract selective
attention. However, the amount of ‘distracter’ players in the current task was also comparably high and
may have been another reason for the relatively long
reaction times.
An important underlying factor in the successful
identification of the offside position was the actual
experience in playing ballgames. While all children
had learned from our introduction with the Subbuteo
game, the consideration of the action-based experiential factor revealed that boys who played ballgames
several times per week showed as a group a better
and more systematic approach than the girls in the
present study.
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Reaction Times
C. Lange-Küttner and G. Bosco / Experience, Concepts, and the Off-Side Position
This demonstrated that boys’ experience of being
and acting within in a spatial field was crucial to
decision-making about the offside position at age
seven and nine, like in adult male-only samples (Gilis
et al., 2008). Our result is in accordance with a recent
study showing that football training on the ground did
not only improve physical scores such as sprinting
and jumping, but also a visual discrimination score
which measured figure-ground perception, perceptual grouping and discrimination of detail in 7–11
year old children (Alesi et al., 2015). Moreover, in a
recent study of the role of experience in the quicker
game of table tennis which is played within a smaller
area with a lighter ball, the acceleration of the ball
in the game was the most reliable indicator of expertise and experience (Padulo et al., 2016). Hence, it
may be a possibility that the visual tracking of the
football in the game improves visual discrimination
that benefits children and adults also in computerized assessments such as the offside rule task that we
developed.
There is an ongoing debate whether spatial cognition is based on experience, or on spatial concepts
(e.g. De Goede & Postma, 2015; Hund & Minarik,
2006; Lange-Küttner & Küttner, 2015; Rieser & Pick,
2007). Specifically in children, it may also be the
case that the fierce competition for the football that
needs to be learned by young children who often do
not appreciate competitive games (Priewasser et al.,
2013) acts as a mediator for tracking the position of
the ball, respectively tracking who is in possession
of the ball. A “caring” kindergarten approach would
allocate each player a ball so that there would be no
fight, but also no monitoring or search.
Thus, the current experimental study with children
confirmed the general insight from adult studies on
the offside rule that conceptual knowledge may need
enrichment with action-based participation in the
field in order to result in intelligent decisions. While
our dry-run training with the Subbuteo game forged
an understanding that allowed both boys and girls to
discriminate between offside and non-offside position, the more frequent real-life learning-by-doing
that boys reported may have sharpened their visuospatial perception.
A limitation of the current study is that game
experience was not an experimental design factor.
Follow-up studies may be able to include the gender
factor based on specific play experience rather than
just based on the biological difference between the
sexes. For instance, if one recruited a select group of
girls who competitively train to play women football
Alesi, M., Bianco, A., Padulo, J., Luppina, G., Petrucci, M., Paoli,
A., ... & Pepi, A. (2015). Motor and cognitive growth following
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International Journal of Developmental Science 1-2/2016, 73–84
81
and compared these against boys who prefer libraries
over the football ground, the offside rule task may
show the same effect of football game experience,
but reversed in terms of gender distribution.
Author Note
We thank the Deputy Head Teacher Sue Laney, the
teaching staff as well as children and their parents of
the CE Sir John Cass’s Foundation Primary School,
London, UK, for taking part in the study. We are grateful to our technician John Hucker for guidance with
the development of the E-Prime experiment, and two
anonymous reviewers for their comments.
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Bio Sketches
Christiane Lange-Küttner, PhD Max Planck Institute
for Human Development, Berlin. Post-doc Research
Fellow 1993-94 Cognitive Science Lab, Dept. of
International Journal of Developmental Science 1-2/2016, 73–84
Experimental Psychology, Freie Universität Berlin;
Academic faculty 1994-99 Dept. of Psychology, University of Aberdeen, 1999- Dept. of Psychology,
London Metropolitan University. 2008-2015 Privatdozentin Universität Bremen, 2009-11 Professor
Developmental Psychology, Universität Konstanz.
2014 Honorary Associate Professor, University of
Nicosia, Cyprus. Research on visuo-spatial cognition in searching, drawing, reading and memory as
well as on learning with and without repetition under
deterministic and stochastic feedback conditions.
Giorgia Bosco, 2015 MSc. in Psychology, University of Turin. 2014-2015 Intern student at the London
Metropolitan University.
83
C. Lange-Küttner and G. Bosco / Experience, Concepts, and the Off-Side Position
APPENDIX
Table A1
Statistical Effects: Accuracy Off-side Judgment
Factor
SS
df
Within-subject effects
Offside
1269.70
1
Offside by Age Group
265.05
1
Offside by Gender
608.75
1
Offside by Age Group by Gender
98.67
1
Between-subject effects
Age Group
1090.86
1
Gender
765.49
1
Age Group by Gender
1041.67
1
F
p
eta
7.47
1.56
3.58
0.58
0.011
0.222
0.068
0.452
0.21
0.05
0.11
0.02
3.13
2.20
2.99
0.087
0.149
0.095
0.10
0.07
0.09
Note. Significant effects are set in bold.
Table A2
Statistical Effects: Reaction Times Off-side Judgment
Factor
SS
df
Within-subject effects
Offside
51721.07
1
Offside by Age Group
128869.76
1
Offside by Gender
423254.29
1
Offside by Age Group by Gender
446899.50
1
Between-subject effects
Age Group
206525677.90
1
Gender
11180401.31
1
Age Group by Gender
1041.67
1
F
p
eta
0.18
0.46
1.50
1.59
0.671
0.504
0.230
0.218
0.01
0.02
0.05
0.05
15.42
0.84
2.12
0.000
0.368
0.156
0.35
0.03
0.07
Note. Significant effects are set in bold.
Table A3
Statistical Effects: One Sample t-tests against 50% Chance Performance (Accuracy in %)
One-Sample Tests (two-tailed), Test Value = 50
p
Lower
95% CI of the Difference
Upper
–17.66
–22.68
–11.80
–16.60
–18.923
–20.000
–24.17
–24.73
–13.68
–15.27
–12.000
–19.400
–15.23
–23.71
–8.77
–15.09
M Difference
t
df
offside trials
no offside
–10.235
–13.159
32
32
Total sample (N = 33)
0.000
–14.727
0.000
–19.636
offside trials
no offside
–7.857
–9.208
12
12
0.000
0.000
offside trials
no offside
–7.780
–9.417
19
19
0.000
0.000
Girls (n = 13)
Boys (n = 20)
84
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