Selective attention characteristics of expert and novice rifle shooters: An electrocortical study

This study was undertaken to investigate differences in the ability to suppress irrelevant stimuli while performing a psychomotor task on which one group was highly skilled and the other was unskilled by assessing cortical activity and subjective reports in marksmen and novice shooters. These measures were also examined during a task which was novel to both groups to determine if any differences on the primary task of interest generalized to the novel task. Accordingly, 15 expert marksmen and 15 novice shooters were presented with binaural auditory probes which the participants were asked to ignore while performing rifle shooting and word naming tasks. Continuous EEG data were recorded at sites Fz, Cz, and Pz in order to derive N100, P200, and P300 ERP component amplitudes and latencies in response to the auditory probes to assess early and later stages of attentional processing. The data were examined according to group (expert, novice) and task (shooting, word naming). Experts exhibited smaller MOO amplitudes at sites Cz and Pz across tasks. This finding was interpreted to mean that experts were better able to ignore irrelevant stimuli at an early stage of processing, and that this attentional focusing proficiency generalized to a novel task. In contrast, experts exhibited longer N100 latencies to the probe at site Cz during the shooting task compared to the word naming task, while no such differences were observed for novices. Both groups exhibited longer latencies at site Fz during the shooting compared to the word naming task. Experts produced larger amplitudes for the P200 and P300 components compared to novices. There were no significant P200 or P300 latency effects. The finding that experts were able to suppress cortical responses to the auditory probes at an early stage of processing supports early filter models of selective attention. Finally, the findings support the importance of examining multiple ERP measures to gain a fuller understanding of the complex, multi-dimensional attentional characteristics of skilled motor performance.