The explore-exploit trade-off in sports and exercise: a primer on empirical and computational approaches

Sports and exercise require constant on-the-fly decision-making from professional athletes and recreational exercisers alike. In the final minutes of a game, a team may for instance face the choice of sticking with their current strategy, or surprising the opponents with a new approach. Such decisions can be framed in terms of an exploration-exploitation trade-off: the need to balance exploiting a certain outcome with the potentials and risks that come with trying out something new. The explore-exploit framework has been instrumental in advancing our understanding of decision-making across fields such as cognitive science, behavioral economics, and clinical psychology. However, its potential remains largely untapped in sports and exercise psychology, where it could provide valuable insights into decision-making processes, because in sports and exercise, decisions naturally occur in dynamic, uncertain environments with fluctuating rewards and inherent costs. We propose that integrating standardized computational decision-making paradigms to formally investigate the mechanisms underlying exploration-exploitation decisions in sport contexts is a promising approach for our field. Applying these paradigms can provide novel insights into how athletes and exercisers navigate high-stakes, dynamic environments, identifying the factors that shape exploration-exploitation strategies in athletic performance. These insights might enhance training methodologies, optimize decision-making under pressure, and deepen our understanding of human adaptability in complex environments. Furthermore, studying this trade-off in elite sports presents unique opportunities for basic research, offering a setting for examining the limits of human decision-making and the generalizability of cognitive models to peak performance settings.