Perception Anticipation Ability And ERP Characteristics At Stalemate In Tennis Players

Tennis, classified as a skills-dominated across-net antagonistic sport event, needs athletes to anticipate and make decisions in very limited time. With the rapid development of tennis skills, situations in which winning within one or two hits have greatly reduced and the score of "stalemate stage" is becoming increasingly important. Because the decision time is so limited and there are all sorts of uncertainty in the match, research on prediction and decision could help us explore characteristics of cognitive processing, providing methods to detect anticipation ability and theoretical basis for tennis training.The current research adopted the "experts—sub-experts—novices" paradigm,15tennis athletes at masters or first-class level were selected as experts,13second-class athletes as sub-experts,16tennis beginners as novices. The research is based on the theory of cognitive advantages of high level athletes, using the eye movement recording and event related potential technology, recording the visual search path and ERP data during the stalemate, in order to explore the expert players’cognitive processing characteristics and formation mechanism in different sequences.In visual search features of tennis players we found that:(1) In the process of take turn against, arm and tennis racket were the main judging basis for professional athletes and the gaze of expert tennis player focused on the task itself;(2) In the process of judging circuit and dropping point, focus area of expert players was the lower limb movement trend of his opponent. They gazed in the interested key regions for the longest total time and had more stable fixation target to different mission objectives that change quickly.Based on above, we examined the ERP characteristics of tennis players, the results showed that:(1) In the game stalemate, expert tennis players not only showed a significant reaction advantage only at80ms before the opponent contact the ball but also with a higher accuracy rate compared to novice at various time points;(2) The P1and N1, N2, P300component showed that expert players input few cognitive resources in the early stimulus presented time;(3) The analysis of LNC, LPP in left and right hemisphere demonstrated that experts consumed more time and resources to build the representation of the problem situation, assessment and classification. The information processing of experts was different from the sub-experts and the novices and their left and right brain hemispheres had different degree of activation;(4) The N250composition further confirmed the expert players exhibited apparent advantage when the task was difficult.The behavior and ERP data characteristics in anticipating point of ball showed that:(1) The participants’reaction time in the point of ball leaving racket360ms was the shortest and the accuracy was significantly the highest. The sub-expert responded faster240ms after the ball left racket, but the accuracy was still lower than expert players;(2) The analyze of P1and N1components showed that expert players input less cognitive resource in the early period of visual search, paying less attention in discrimination phase and the results of late LNC showed that the expert players used more cognitive resources during the process of analogy.From these three experiments, we concluded that:(1) During judging technical movement period, expert players had a faster reaction speed and higher judgment accuracy compared to novices. These differences mainly derived from the expert players’quick and simple visual search pattern.(2) In the stage of ball routes anticipation, expert players had better external attention ability, thus could grasp the right timing and reasonably allocate cognitive resources. Experts were also good at integrating left and right hemisphere processing, so the behavioral response was fast and accurate.(3) In the stage of determine point of ball, the experts had economic and effective visual search ability that could quickly extract information closely related to task. Experts was characterized to have efficiency psychological operation, concise information processing. The superior ability might attribute to their professional training.The main contribution and innovation of our research is that:(1) In the design of experiment, we adopted "a line type" design in the background of "stalemate", exploring the athletes’anticipation ability in judging technical actions, routes, point step by step, further detailed and in-depth.(2) In the aspect of experimental method, integrating eye movement recording and event related potential technology to explore neural physiological features of visual search behavior and demonstrating the expert’s cognitive advantages from the perspective of time and space. Meanwhile, we sought out the critical moment of experts’anticipation, providing a more detailed reference to guide tennis athlete’s scientific training.