Publications by authors named "Fransen J"

Talent identification and development (TID) in football can be enhanced through objective assessments of talent predictors. Yet, available instruments rarely consider the unique demands of goalkeepers (GKs). During early phases of talent development, considering a GK's giftedness relating to, for example, different abilities (e.

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This study aimed to examine the effect of visual pre-cueing presented at different time intervals in the response time of dyslexic and non-dyslexic children. Fifteen dyslexic and 15 non-dyslexic children performed a computerised four-choice reaction time task across four conditions: no pre-cue and a 43-ms time interval (or duration) of a centralised dot appearing in the stimulus circle at 43, 86 or 129 ms prior to the stimulus. Each condition was repeated eight times, totaling 32 trials, and presented in a random order.

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: The relationship between task constraints and player behaviors is of interest to coaches tasked with designing practice to optimize learning. This study aims to compare the skill involvements and cooperative team behavior of teams of youth soccer players engaged in a goal exaggeration and/or a prescriptive coach instruction condition compared to a free-play control condition. : Twenty male soccer players aged 12-15 participated in small-sided games under four conditions: free-play, goal exaggeration, prescriptive coach instruction, and combination over four weeks.

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In this opinion piece I reiterate the concepts of near and far transfer as previously described in the psychological literature. I show that despite very limited evidence, many technologies, tools and methods make questionable claims of eliciting far transfer from generic perceptual and/or cognitive training to sports performance. Specifically, this commentary illustrates with studies on stroboscopic vision, neurofeedback training and executive functions that the claims made for the beneficial effects of these training methods are currently unsubstantiated.

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This study aimed to explore the perceptual-cognitive characteristics of coaches as they assessed team performance in youth soccer. The primary focus was to investigate the alignment between coaches' subjective analyses of team behaviour and objective analyses, while also examining the relationship between coaches' gaze behaviour and their levels of coaching experience, particularly considering the potential differences that may exist among coaches with varying levels of experience. Sixty-five male and female adults with various soccer coaching experience (experienced, novice, other team sport experience, and non-team sport experience) watched five 4-minute videos and assessed team behaviour.

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Background: Skill acquisition science is the study of how motor skills are acquired, developed and/or learned. There is substantive evidence for general motor skill acquisition in controlled laboratory settings yet the literature on the learning of sports-related skills is typically less conclusive.

Objectives: This scoping review aimed to summarise the current literature on skill acquisition intervention studies examining the learning of sports-related skills as part of a randomised controlled trial, by synthesizing and extracting the most relevant features.

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The current commentary adopts a skill acquisition science perspective on the distinction between skill and technique, two constructs often confused in football science and practice. It first positions technique as a coordination pattern. It then argues that experts rarely (if ever) coordinate their neuromuscular system in the same way through evidence of inter- and intra-individual movement variability from football science and other domains of sport science.

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Introduction: Soccer coaches are critical to academies as they are central to identifying players with the potential to succeed (i.e., talent).

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Evolution has equipped vertebrates and invertebrates with neural circuits that selectively encode visual motion. While similarities in the computations performed by these circuits in mouse and fruit fly have been noted, direct experimental comparisons have been lacking. Because molecular mechanisms and neuronal morphology in the two species are distinct, we directly compared motion encoding in these two species at the algorithmic level, using matched stimuli and focusing on a pair of analogous neurons, the mouse ON starburst amacrine cell (ON SAC) and T4 neurons.

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Effective team behavior in high-performance environments such as in sport and the military requires individual team members to efficiently perceive the unfolding task events, predict the actions and action intents of the other team members, and plan and execute their own actions to simultaneously accomplish individual and collective goals. To enhance team performance through effective cooperation, it is crucial to measure the situation awareness and dynamics of each team member and how they collectively impact the team's functioning. Further, to be practically useful for real-life settings, such measures must be easily obtainable from existing sensors.

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The current study explored the association between talent pool size and relative age effects in Football Australia's talent pathway. It also compared relative age effects between male and female players. Participants were 54,207 youth football players (females:  = 12,527, age-range = 14.

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Assessment of burn extent and depth are critical and require very specialized diagnosis. Automated image-based algorithms could assist in performing wound detection and classification. We aimed to develop two deep-learning algorithms that respectively identify burns, and classify whether they require surgery.

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Within the transient receptor potential (TRP) superfamily of ion channels, TRPV5 is a highly Ca -selective channel important for active reabsorption of Ca in the kidney. Its channel activity is controlled by a negative feedback mechanism involving calmodulin (CaM) binding. Combining advanced microscopy techniques and biochemical assays, this study characterized the dynamic lobe-specific CaM regulation.

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Objectives: Connectedness is a cooperative network measure that describes how well players in the team bi-directionally connect and how easily reachable they are to other players. It has been associated with an increased probability of winning competitive matches in professional Australian Football (AF), although applications towards training have not been reported. Therefore, this study investigated associations between constraints manipulated by professional AF coaches and the connectedness of cooperative passing networks during a small-sided game (SSG).

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Correlative light and electron microscopy (CLEM) is a powerful imaging approach that allows the direct correlation of information obtained on a light and an electron microscope. There is a growing interest in the application of CLEM in biology, mainly attributable to technical advances in field of fluorescence microscopy in the past two decades. In this review, we summarize the important developments in CLEM for biological applications, focusing on the combination of fluorescence microscopy and electron microscopy.

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Objectives: Due to the nature of firefighting, most effective cooling interventions to reduce heat strain and optimise performance are not practically viable. This study quantified the effects of two practical cooling strategies, co-designed with subject-matter experts, on physiological strain and physical, perceptual, and visuo-motor performance during simulated firefighting in the heat.

Design: Randomised cross-over.

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Background: An expert/non-expert paradigm often helps understand the underpinnings of sports expertise; however, this method is scarcely extended to the complexities of collective behaviour in youth soccer.

Aim: Therefore, the objectives of the current study are to investigate differences in the collective behaviour of youth soccer teams by expertise level.

Methodology: Soccer players aged 15 to 20 years from high (n = 35) and low (n = 40) playing levels competed in two age-matched 5v5 small-sided games.

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Introduction: This study sought to reduce the dimensionality of commonly reported spatiotemporal characteristics obtained from Australian Football games to facilitate their practical use and interpretability.

Methods: A retrospective longitudinal design was utilised with team and individual spatiotemporal variables, measured via global navigation satellite system devices, collected during official Australian Football League matched over three seasons. Two separate principal component analyses were conducted at the team and individual level to reduce correlated spatiotemporal characteristics into a smaller set of uncorrelated components.

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Article Synopsis
  • The study aimed to assess the physiological and psychophysical responses of elite female rugby sevens athletes during a 5-day heat acclimatization training camp in Darwin, Australia.
  • Results showed significant improvements in exercising heart rate and thermal sensation from day 1 to day 5, while resting core temperature did not change significantly.
  • The findings suggest that while cardiovascular adaptations occurred, more extreme heat exposure may be needed for better adjustments in core temperature and sweat rates, highlighting the need for more research on female athletes in hot conditions.
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Despite awareness of the importance of quantifying technical, tactical, and physical characteristics of match play, few studies have examined the structural relationship of these aspects in professional sport. Accordingly, this study concurrently examined these components in relation to quarter outcome (n = 272) in Australian Football. The study followed a retrospective longitudinal case study design where one teams' cooperative passing network, skill counts, physical loads, and spatiotemporal behaviours during official Australian Football League games were collected from a period spanning four seasons (2016-2019).

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Introduction: Burn injuries are a common traumatic injury. Large burns have high mortality requiring intensive care and accurate mortality predictions. To assess if machine learning (ML) could improve predictions, ML algorithms were tested and compared with the original and revised Baux score.

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