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In fast-moving situations, waiting until an obstacle is directly in front of us may leave too little time to respond. The brain therefore uses available information to anticipate what is likely to happen next and begins preparing an appropriate action in advance.
This relationship between advance information and movement preparation forms the central cognitive principle behind Pace Race. While the player runs forward, a banner provides information about an upcoming obstacle represented by another football player. The user must interpret this warning and prepare a response before reaching the obstacle.
Anticipation is the ability to use available information to predict a future event before it fully unfolds. It is especially important in dynamic sports, where players frequently have only fractions of a second to respond to an opponent’s movement.
Athletes do not always wait until an action has been completed. Instead, they use information such as an opponent’s position, movement pattern, body orientation, and previous tendencies to estimate what is likely to happen next.
This process does not guarantee a correct prediction. It allows the motor system to begin preparing possible responses, reducing the amount of processing required when the decisive event occurs.
A 2023 study by Qingchun Ji, Chenglin Zhou, and Yingying Wang examined how prior directional information affected action anticipation in football.
In the first experiment, 17 semi-elite goalkeepers and 18 non-athletes watched videos of penalty kicks. The videos were interrupted either at the moment of contact between the foot and ball or 50 or 100 milliseconds before contact. Before watching the action, participants sometimes received information about the probable direction of the kick.
Directional information improved anticipation accuracy when the videos stopped 50 or 100 milliseconds before contact. At these early moments, the movement itself did not yet provide complete information, so advance knowledge became particularly useful.
The researchers conducted a second experiment involving another 27 experienced football players and 27 non-athletes. This time, they also recorded event-related brain activity. The results suggested that trained players were more effective at combining prior information with the movement information visible in the video. When these information sources conflicted, neural activity associated with conflict monitoring also changed.
These findings show that anticipation is not based on a single cue. The brain combines expectations formed in advance with information arriving from the current situation.
Another study by Matthew Andrew and Joe Causer examined anticipation during football penalty kicks in 216 participants from different sporting backgrounds.
Participants watched life-sized penalty-kick videos from the goalkeeper’s perspective. Each video was hidden at the moment the player kicked the ball, after which participants had to predict where the ball would go.
Skilled football players made more accurate predictions than less-skilled football players and participants from other sports. The results indicate that effective anticipation depends partly on experience with the specific visual patterns found in a particular activity.
Experienced players may become better at identifying the parts of an action that contain useful predictive information. However, this advantage should not be understood as faster eyesight. It reflects the interpretation of incomplete visual information based on previous experience.
Pace Race does not reproduce these experiments directly. The game provides explicit information about an upcoming obstacle, whereas the scientific studies examined how people anticipated football actions from prior information and incomplete movement cues.
Nevertheless, the tasks share several structural elements:
The banner in Pace Race functions as an advance cue. It gives the player an opportunity to shift attention toward the upcoming challenge and begin preparing a response before the obstacle enters the immediate running space.
As the interval between the warning and the obstacle becomes shorter, the player has less time to interpret the cue, select a response, and execute it. The task therefore connects perception, anticipation, decision-making, and motor preparation within a continuous sequence.
Reaction is often described as a response that begins after an event occurs. Anticipation begins earlier. It uses partial or advance information to reduce uncertainty about the event that is coming.
In Pace Race, the player is not simply reacting to a footballer who suddenly appears. The banner creates a brief prediction phase. During this phase, the user can prepare for the next obstacle while continuing to manage the current movement.
This does not mean that Pace Race has been scientifically demonstrated to improve reaction time or athletic anticipation. Establishing such an effect would require a controlled study using the game itself. What can be said is that its mechanics involve processes closely related to those investigated in scientific research on prior information, action anticipation, selective attention, and movement preparation.
Ji, Q., Zhou, C., & Wang, Y. (2023). Influence of conflicting prior information on action anticipation in soccer players: An ERP study. Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, 17, 1320900.
Andrew, M., & Causer, J. (2022). Does anticipation of penalty kicks in soccer transfer across similar and dissimilar sports?. Cognitive Processing, 23, 459–465.