The influence of Cajal and Lorente de Nó on Donald O. Hebb's neuropsychological theory.

Basketball is a dynamic, open-skill sport that requires athletes to continuously integrate information about teammates, opponents, ball possession, and spatial relationships in rapidly changing game situations. They must then make timely situational judgments and select appropriate actions (; ). From an ecological dynamics perspective, this decision-making process emerges from the ongoing interaction between athletes and their environment. It depends on the real-time perception of affordances and the capacity to generate adaptive responses (). Therefore, when mental fatigue impairs attentional control, information integration, or response selection, it may delay basketball decision-making and reduce adaptive performance (; ). Mental fatigue is generally defined as a psychophysiological state that develops after prolonged engagement in cognitively demanding tasks. It is characterized by increased subjective fatigue, reduced motivation, and impaired cognitive control (; ; ). In sport contexts, mental fatigue has been shown to impair physical performance, sport-specific skill execution, and decision-making. However, its effects may vary according to task type, outcome measure, and sport discipline (). In basketball, existing review evidence indicates that mental fatigue may impair technical performance and decision-making quality (). Because mental fatigue induction is typically accompanied by subjective changes, such as increased perceived fatigue, reduced task engagement, or altered alertness, subjective rating scales are commonly used as manipulation checks. These scales help determine whether cognitive load tasks have produced the expected fatigue response (; ; ; ). Visual search reflects how athletes acquire and use key information during decision-making and is therefore central to understanding sport-specific decision processes. Eye-tracking studies commonly assess attentional allocation using measures such as fixation count, mean fixation duration, and saccade count. Scan paths and heat maps are also used to visualize the spatial distribution and transitions of gaze within a scene (; ). In team invasion sports, skilled athletes generally identify tactically relevant areas more quickly and allocate visual attention more selectively. By contrast, less experienced athletes tend to display more dispersed search patterns and are more susceptible to irrelevant information (; ; ). Basketball-specific studies have similarly shown that high-level athletes are more likely to fixate on information areas directly relevant to offensive and defensive decision-making, whereas novices exhibit gaze patterns that are more dispersed, repetitive, and less organized (; ). Thus, skill-level differences may be reflected not only in decision outcomes but also in how athletes select, extract, and organize task-relevant information.