The Features Research Andy FMRI Research Of Basketball Athletes In The Course Of Visual-Motion Perceptual Anticipation

Behavioral studies show that elite athletes exhibit not only high executionaccuracy, but also excellent performance on anticipation, both of which often play apart in rapid and complex motor conditions. In particular, elite athletes are able tomake decisions within a limited time when the game is in progress. Actionanticipation is highly relevant to motor skills. Experts display better actionanticipation compared to novices in a variety of sports such. The difference betweenelite athletes and novices in action anticipation may be resulted from better visualperception in elite athletes compared to novices. Visual perception is an active processof locating and extracting visual information from the environment and integratingthem with other sensory inputs. In addition, various cognitive factors including pastexperience, motivation and development are involved in incorporating all theintegrated information in visual perception. Previous studies revealed that themethods elite athletes and novices used to extract visual information for anticipationare different. However, the analysis of the behavioral level were foucs in these studies,empirical support of neural mechanisms level were rare. And it is still not clear howvisual perception is involved in the anticipation of a motor task and what theunderlying neural elements are as it is applied to the functional activity in the relatedbrain areas.Guided by the view that the cognitive advantages elite athletes come fromacquired experience and based on the feature-integration theory, the present study isintended to examine the role visual-motion perception ability plays during the motoranticipation process and its neural mechanisms. Both expert-novice and timeocclusion paradigms were applied. Electrooculography was used to compare the eyemovement characteristics between the basketball players and novices; functionalmagnetic resonance imaging(fMRI) methods was used used to contrast the differencesof cerebral activation regions of the two groups under visual anticipation tasks. Thisstudy explored the neuro-psychological mechanism of visual-motion perception bycombining the anticipation features with the changes of central nervous system. Thefindings will enrich and develop the theoretical achievements in the motor-cognitiveresearch field and provide guidance for athlete training.The results indicated that:(1) in the three picture condition(the ball leaving theplayer’s hand) or the six picture condition(the ball reaching its trajectory climax), both athletes and novices showed higher response rate and correct response rate; while inthe nine picture condition(the ball falling into the basket), the two groups performedcomparatively bad in both response and correct rate;(2) athletes exhibited betterattentional stability than that of novices;(3) particular visual trajectory was observedin athletes rather than novices; the differences were especially conspicuous in thethree picture condition: athletes firstly paid attention to the player’s arm and wristwhile novices’ fixed their attention on the player’s trunk;(4) athletes and novicesshowed similar cerebral activation regions;(5) athletes showed higher correctresponse rate and greater activation in inferior parietal lobule and inferior prefrontalcortex relative to novices under the first two conditions;(6) both groups showedgreater activation in the superior frontal gyrus under the last two conditions;(7) bothgroups showed smaller recognition rate of incorrect motion than correct motion;(8)athletes showed greater activation in inferior frontal gyrus and inferior prefrontal lobewhen observing ball IN pictures than ball OUT ones; on the other way round, middletemporal gyrus and superior temporal sulcus were observed greater activation;(9) thecingulate gyrus was observed greater activation when participants were observing ballIN pictures relative to ball OUT ones, which indicated it may underlie the earlyrecognition of misoperation in athletes relative to novices;(10) under the six picturecondition, athletes showed greater activation in inferior frontal gyrus or insular whenmore correct or incorrect responses were made, respectively.The following conclusions were reached from the present study:(1) Basketball gameathletes show better visual-motor cognitive ability. And the mirror neural system playsan important part in basketball anticipation tasks; Athletes are able to create betterworking memory than novices;(2) The cognitive processes of correct operation andmisoperation may be different and that of the latter may cost more motor perceptionand comprehension resources. The terminal goal(making a basket) is the initialexpectation of both athletes and novices, but misoperation would modify the ball’sfate and correspondingly activate different brain regions;(3) The anterior cingulatecortex is related to the anticipation of misoperation;(4) Athletes are able to recognizetheir misjudgements, which is absent in novices.