Reinforcement learning in professional basketball players

Tal Neiman () and Yonatan Loewenstein ()
Additional contact information
Tal Neiman: The Interdisciplinary Center for Neural Computation and Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Brain Sciences, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Yonatan Loewenstein: The Interdisciplinary Center for Neural Computation and Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Brain Sciences, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Nature Communications, 2011, vol. 2, issue 1, 1-8

Abstract: Abstract Reinforcement learning in complex natural environments is a challenging task because the agent should generalize from the outcomes of actions taken in one state of the world to future actions in different states of the world. The extent to which human experts find the proper level of generalization is unclear. Here we show, using the sequences of field goal attempts made by professional basketball players, that the outcome of even a single field goal attempt has a considerable effect on the rate of subsequent 3 point shot attempts, in line with standard models of reinforcement learning. However, this change in behaviour is associated with negative correlations between the outcomes of successive field goal attempts. These results indicate that despite years of experience and high motivation, professional players overgeneralize from the outcomes of their most recent actions, which leads to decreased performance.

Date: 2011
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (16)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms1580 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:2:y:2011:i:1:d:10.1038_ncomms1580

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/ncomms1580

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().