Cognition and emotion play an important role in the referees'decision-making process,but there is a lack of a systematic theoretical framework to deeply explore into the mechanism behind it.Through literature review,logical analysis and induction,this paper made a theoretical study of the referees'decision-making,and held that the referees'decision-making had dual considerations of the overall interests of the game and the fairness of the game,which was the result of the joint participation of cognition and emotion.Moreover,the referees'penalty was a decision-making process from the perceptual system to the intuitive nerve and then to the careful nerve,and neural networks such as dorsal attention network,prominence network,default mode network,reward network and central executive network would be mobilized to jointly deal with emotional and cognitive control,which provided theoretical guidance for improving the scientific and accurate decision-making and ensuring the fairness of the game.The future researches would be to verify the neural mechanism of different factors participating in the referees'emotion and cognition,to explore the relationship between the referees'professional experience and the neural mechanism of penalty decision,to analyze the influence of artificial intelligence the referee on the traditional penalty decision,to systematically verify the brain activity pattern,neural network connection,cognitive and emotional mechanism in the process of referees'decision-making from the experimental perspective.