Plans to develop "skill acquisition" in a bid to help find new ways to improve elite sporting performance in the UK have been announced by the English Institute of Sport (EIS).

It follows the results of UK Sport's athlete survey, which identified skill acquisition as one of the areas in need of development within sport science in a bid to better understand how cognitive, motor and perceptual skills are developed in elite performers. Michael Bourne, EIS' new technical lead for skill acquisition, said: "Skill acquisition provides measurable insight into elements of performance such as visual search, tactical pattern recognition and anticipation of opponent's actions, as well as assessing how coaching and feedback impacts upon athlete learning and development.

"The discipline works closely with sports psychology and performance analysis and over this next year, we will be completing a number of projects with sports to identify where this discipline can have the biggest potential impact."