An FMRI Study On Effect Of Motor Skill Level On Multiple Object Tracking Ability

Visual attention plays a crucial role in sports,especially team sports.In the confrontational sports(e.g.,basketball etc.),players monitor activities of multiple teammate and defenders and their location.Multiple object tracking paradigm is used to study how our vision system tracks multiple moving objects simultaneously,as well as continuous visual attention in dynamic context.It has been shown that compared with controls,professional athletes tracked better multiple objects.And with the increase of the number of targets,the accuracy rate of the professional athletes in the multiple object tracking is significantly better than those who have no experience in sports.However,neural mechanisms lying this phenomenon is unclear.Neuroimaging studies on multiple object tracking have shown that superior parietal lobule play a role in attention shift.Theoretical model shows that attention shift is an important stage in tracking process,and speed of attention shift may affect the ability of multi-target tracking.Therefore,this study hypothesis that with increase of attention load,performance difference of basketball players and the controls increases and the activation of superior parietal lobule increases.In this study,we used functional magnetic resonance imaging(fMRI)technique to explore brain function activation of basketball players and control under different attention load conditions.Functional magnetic resonance imaging(fMRI)was used to investigate the brain areas of activation of 13 basketball players and 14 controls and differences between the two groups.The results showed that:(1)In the behavior experiment,there was no significant difference between the two players when tracking two targets,but there were significant differences between the two players when tracking three or four targets.The difference between correct rate of basketball players and the controls was the highest when the four target were tracked.(2)In the fMRI experiment,compared to controls,activated areas are right middle frontal gyrus,left cerebellum crus1/cerebellum crus2,right middle temporal gyrus,right angular gyrus/middle occipital gyrus when basketball players track two,three and four target objects.In turn,compared to the basketball players,controls activated right superior occipital gyrus /precuneus in tracking two,three and four objects.(3)Activated areas of interactions of groups(basketball players and controls)and attention loads(2,3,and 4)are superior parietal lobule.Conclusion: Professional athletes have better multi-target tracking ability.With increase of attention load,this advantage is more obvious.Athletes showed higher activity in superior parietal lobule with increase of attention load.The difference between elite athletes and novices in tracking ability is caused by attention shift.The results provide practical basis for exercise training and theoretical the study for neural mechanism of attention.