Question: You said you design things... What do you design?

Stuart Mourton answered on 13 Jun 2011:

I mainly design ways of investigating certain areas of sporting performance. For example, if I want to look at how your expectations on what an opponent will do affect your choices, then I have to come up with a way on investigating that. You can’t really go up to a goalkeeper in the middle of a penalty shoot out and ask him ‘where are you expecting him to shoot?’ then go back to him when he’s missed it and ask him ‘so why do you think you were wrong?’ It’s not really possible for one and most goalies are pretty big and I’d probably get punched!! I have to design computer tasks that mimic the decisions sports people have to make in high pressure, time sensitive situations; like a penalty shoot out. This can be hard as it obviously tricky to make a computer simulation as accurate as the real thing but there are certain parts we can carry over from real life into our lab studies.