The Characteristic Of Using Cues In Action Anticipation Among Expert Athletes

Action anticipation,determing a conuterpart's next movements before it happens,is a critical skill in open,time-constrained environment.Being able to infer the actions of others is crucial for effective interactions in dynamic environments,expecially in sports.The effective anticipation can make up the delay between the dynamic of moving target,and saving time for an accurate perceptual judgement.From an evolutionary perspective,the anticipation of an upcoming action based on environmental cues is of great importance for individuals' survival,as it may help individuals estimate other people's or animal's intentions in order to better prepare adaptive reactions to approach safety and avoid harm.Comparing with the situation in daily life,sport represents an ideal testing ground in which to study the human action anticipation that are developed with expertise.A correct anticipation of the opponents' intention is the key to making a speedy offensive or defensive move.Many studies have investigated the process underpinning expert action anticipation skills.In comparison to less experienced performers,experienced athlethes have a superior ability to successfully anticipate the action of opposing players.But less is discussed the possible advantage of using the advanced cues and the dynamic cues,especially how and how much.It is still unclear the influence of processing advanced information on expert anticipation.The current study is based on a typical inception even in action anticipation,table tennis.With the high time-constrained,and clear cues,we set up variables with different combination of the body cue and ball cue.Meanwhile,participants were grouped into elites group,amateur group and control group based on the table tennis training experience and skill level.Video based footages were partially occluded and probably congruence or incongruence within the body cue and ball cue.Meanwhile,the electroencephalogram was used to recording the dynamic of cortical activity,and was analysed to investigate the processing in expert action anticipation.The following results were showed from five experiemnts.Experiment 1-i)the elites group had a higher accuracy than the other two groups when the video-clips were occluded before the ball cue showed up;ii)while both the elites group and amateur group had a better accuracy than the control group when the ball cue was offered in the videoclips;Experiment 2 – iii)the accuracy of elites group and amateur group was sharply decreased in the incongruence video-clips;Experiment 3 – iv)for two experienced groups,their ability to discriminate these two cues was better,comparing with the control group;v)the experienced groups had a higher accuracy than the control group with only the body cue;Experience 4 –vi)the method of cortical activities were different in discriminate two cues in both elites group and amateur group,but no difference was found in the control group;vii)when watching the incongruence footages,the cortical activities were larger in experienced groups than the control group,and the elites group also activied earlier than the amateur group;Experience 5 – viii)valid anticipation could induce the accuracy in following cognitive task,but didn't work for the reaction time;x)the amateur group showed a stragy of promoting the accuracy,but reducing the speed.Based on these results,we got following conclutions:(i)Motor experience promote the action anticipation ability by recognize the body cue.(ii)The experience could speed up the recognition and processing the body cue;(iii)Comparing with the non-experienced individuals,the experienced individuals could recognize the conflict of bady cue and ball cue,by larger inhibition of center region of cortical and activity of parietal-occipital region.