The impact of working memory capacity on intuitive decision-making in sport

The basic assumption of dual-process theory is that intuitive decision-making (DM) does not require cognitive resources such as working memory capacity (WMC). However, recent evidence from reasoning research points to the opposite, showing an association between higher cognitive capacities and superior intuitive DM. This appears highly relevant for dynamic and interactive sports, which require intuitive DM in many situations. Therefore, the present study investigated whether higher WMC is beneficial for intuitive DM in sport. Initially, participants' visuospatial and verbal WMC were assessed. Participants then performed a sport DM task in which they had to decide whether a handball penalty was thrown to the left or right. They also completed a control reasoning task. Both tasks were conducted under time pressure and concurrent cognitive load to increase the likelihood of intuitive responses. Using moderated regression analyses, we investigated whether DM performance was predicted by visuospatial and verbal WMC. The results revealed no impact of visuospatial WMC, but suggest that verbal WMC may moderate performance in the sport DM task. For the reasoning task, we showed that performance was moderated by both visuospatial and verbal WMC, with higher capacities allowing for more accurate but slower decisions. Our findings suggest that WMC has an impact on intuitive DM in verbal reasoning DM tasks, but this is not universally valid and may vary when visual information needs to be processed in more applied DM scenarios, such as in the context of sport. We discuss several methodological limitations and provide suggestions to guide future research.