Abstract: The study of decision making in sports has always been a significant field of cognitive psychology in sports. Action anticipation is the core of decision making in sports, which is thought to be influenced by kinematic and non-kinematic information factors. One of the key issues in the study of action anticipation is to explore the contribution of diverse information sources to the expectation of action outcome and the interaction between them. The researchers explain the integration process of different information in action anticipation in sports and analyze how athletes make the optimal choice in complex competition situations in sports by using Bayesian decision theory, especially its potential applications in tennis and soccer. Although not all choices, outcomes, or probabilities in competitive sports are known in the context of uncertainty, some researchers believe that probability theory and canonical decision theory cannot effectively solve such problems, the newly proposed heuristic approximation provides a theoretical basis for athletes to make a rapid choice in the Bayesian framework. First of all, in complex and time pressure competitive situations, heuristic approximation assumes that athletes are likely to choose a switching heuristic between kinematic information and contextual priors according to the uncertainty of different information sources in the competition, so as to improve the efficiency of action anticipation. Secondly, judgement utility affects the integration of two information sources through the effect of convolution, so as to reduce the impact degree of contextual priors.

Key words: action anticipation, contextual priors, judgement utility, heuristic approximation