Characteristics On Cognitive Processing During Decision-making Of Table Tennis Athletes

As many countries continue to raise the level of competitive sports and the rise of cognitive psychology, researchers put more and more emphasis on characteristics of athletes' information processing in sport scenario. Athletes'visual search for related information and cognitive processing of information are of great significance to their completion of action. Therefore, studies on athletes'cognitive processing characteristics of decision-making process, has both theoretical and practical value for helping them improve their response capabilities and competitive level.The expert-novice paradigm is adopted in this study. Independent variable is subjects' competitive level. This study combines eye-tracking system and event-related potentials system together and discusses athletes' expertise in sport scenario and characteristics of decision-making behavior, visual search and cognitive processing of decision-making mainly from two angles:features and process of dicision-making.The results shows:(1)Table tennis players have advantages on decision-making process and presented as higher accuracy and faster response time; (2) Students' choice is closer to the probability distribution, and they are more inclined to choose the middle and closer positions, while the table tennis players make choice mainly based on their cognitive information processing results, and their response is close to the theoretical distribution; (3) Among athletes' choices, the more away from the correct location, reaction time is longer and the frequency of choice is lower; (4) Compared with college students, table tennis players have earlier first and last fixation, fewer numbers of fixations, shorter fixation duration time, samller inter fixation degrees and higher fixation frequency. Moreover, athletes'visual search pattern is more like a circle; their fixations are concentrated in the racket, arm and trunk of players who serves the ball. Whereas the students' fixations are distributed scattered and irregularly; Before and after the activation of N2(350-450ms), athletes'fixations in their correct responses coincide with the trajectory of swing in serving;(5) At about 400ms after stimulus onset, athletes and students activate a distinct negative wave N2 in the frontal and prefrontal scalp, while in the occipital and parietal areas, only athletes have a small negative N2 wave; Athletes' N2 latency is earlier than students in frontal, but later in occipital scalp; During the activation of N2, athletes'frontal area is actived more than students', while laterly, athletes have more activation in their central and parietal area; (6) At about 500ms after stimulus onset, athletes and students have an obvious positive wave P3, athletes'P3 peak amplitude in the right frontal and temporal area is larger and their P3 latency in the right temporal and parietal area is later than students; In the early period of P3, athletes' prefrontal area is actived ealier than students, while in the late period, their central and parietal area is actived later than students and has a larger area of activation; (7) Athletes'N2 amplitude of wrong response in the central and posterior scalp is greater than that of correct response; N2 latency in the right side of prefrontal area is later than in wrong response; and athletes'P3 latency of the correct response is slightly earlier than in wrong response; during the activation of N2 and P3, atheltes'frontal, central, partietal and occipital area is actived more when they make wrong decisions.Conclusions are as follows:(1) Athletes make their decisions based on the cognitive processing of sports information, while the decisions of students will be impacted by their preference;(2) Athletes' perception of sports information is a process of pattern recognition. Feature matching plays a significant role in this process;(3) When there are more mismatches between perceived features and features of stored patterns, more cognitive resources will be allocated to visual search in order to search more key features to complete the recognition, thus the extension of reaction time;(4) Between factors of speed and accuracy, athletes tend to rapid response.(5) In the context of limited cognitive resouces, athletes have concept-driven processing besides the data-driven processing during the pattern recognition of sports information. They assign more cognitive resources to searching and extracting specific features, which will make their visual search patterns more cost-effective;(6) Athletes' decision making process can be summarized as follows:extracting specific features→activating relative patterns→searching for key features→completing pattern recognition→making decision→motor output. If the features searched failed to complete pattern recognition, the central processing need to return to the searching and extraction of key features, until the completion of pattern recognition, then the decision would be made and motor would be output.