Attention Allocation Process Of The Expert Tennis Players: An ERP Study

Previous researches have demonstrated that the sports experts have perceptual advantages associated with allocation of attention resource such as visual searching and detecting visual cue.The process of perception is based on limited information processing resources.Since cognitive resources are limited,and attention is the allocation of limited processing resources,attention is the heart of cognition.But previous studies,including behavioral research,electrophysiological studies(ERP,PET)and brain imaging studies(fMRI)only put a phenomenological analysis on the sense of the perceptual-cognitive skills that make the sports experts better than sports novices.Studies to explore the reasons why the experts have these advantages are rare,especially in attention allocation process.On the basis of previous studies,this present study used event-related potentials to study the attention allocation process on tennis related information.The purpose of this study is to discuss the attention allocation of the tennis players,in addition,to explore the reasons why the experts have so many priorities.By two separate experiment,the present study studied the attentinon allocation process on tennis scenes,negative faces and pictures overlapped sports scenes and negative faces.In experiment 1,fifteen expert tennis players and fifteen novice tennis players participanted in the study.They were instructed to finish a D-probe task and the reaction time was tested.In experiment 2,eighteen expert tennis players and eighteen novice tennis players participanted in the study.They were instructed to finish a visual attention task.Reaction time and LPPs(the late positive potential)amplitude were recorded and used to offer electrophysiology evidences for the experts' advantages.Results showed that in experiment 1,after negative emotion priming,expert tennis p layers showed no siginificant difference,but novice tennis players showed large separation trend.In experiment 2,negativity bias was found both on experts and novices,and only experts showed high sensitivity towards tennis scene.Simple effect analysis decomposed this interaction effect and revealed a marginally significant simple effect of scene among expert participants,which says the overlapped picture of tennis scene and negative face elicited a larger LPP than that of non-tennis and negative face in expert group,while such LPP effect was absent in the novice group.In conclusion:(1)While encountering skill-related scene information and negative emotional faces simultaneously,which compete for attentional resources,experts showed an increased attentional processing on skill-related scene information compared to the novices.(2)This attentional bias to process skilled-related scene information is likely to be the mechanism of the phenomenon that experts have higher and faster information processing capacity towards skill-related scene.