| Action anticipation,which involves perceiving and predicting the behavior of other individuals,is an essentially important ability for human beings to make quick and effective responses in a complex and dynamic environment where they live.Specifically,in the field of sports,many transverse studies have found that elite athletes can better anticipate the outcome of other's sequence actions belonging to their domain of motor expertise compared with non-athletes or novices,suggesting that ball training may be one of the effective ways to improve the ability of action anticipation.However,these studies fail to explain the causal effects of training on the expected ability of the movement.Recently,a few studies attempted to investigate this issue using adult participants with training experiences more or less and results showed that the middle level athletes or club players improved their ability to predict the fatal of the ball after training,indicating that training can affect the action anticipation ability.But it's not sufficient to rule out the "inherent sensitive" interpretation because the participants already have some training experience before experiment,Then the present study argues that whether "training has a causal effect on the anticipation capacity of ordinary adult" is a question that needs to be further explored.If adults without any experience improve their anticipation ability after the ball training compared with their control counterparts,then it may suggest that there is a causal relationship between the experience and the capacity of anticipation,and this change can occur in adulthood.Furthermore,if the study of the time course of the improvement before and after training reveals that training is accompanied by changes in brain activity,then the "neural mechanism of better anticipation" can be revealed.In addition,combined with the current studies of visual and auditory pathway indicating that perceptual training effect could last three month,we hypothesis that motor training effect in our research is not a temporary but a long term effect too.Therefore,around the issue "training is how to affect the ability to predict the outcome of actions",we take badminton activities as an example,and further put forward three specific questions.First,whether sports training has causal effects on the domain-specific action anticipation ability of adult novices.Second,if the result was positive,what is the neural mechanisms underlying such casual alteration of behavior.Third,is this advantage a short or a long-term effect?In order to verify the above assumptions,this study includes three aspects of research:First,an action anticipation task in which participants watch video clips of badminton games and predict the final landing position of a shuttle being stricken by an opposing player will be performed before and after a 12-week badminton training(1 hour/time ×3 times/week)to explore whether the badminton training can improve the normal adult's anticipation ability,while the control group attend none of sports training over this 12 weeks duration.Second,an ERP experiment is conducted to explore the potential neurophysiological changes in the process of training before and after the training.Third,all participants perform the same tasks after 5 months to explore whether this advantage effect is long existed.Results showed that the training group produced larger amplitudes of two ERP components,a N2 peaking around 300 ms post-stimulus with a frontal scalp distribution and a P300 around 400 ms over parietal sites during the anticipation tasks in the post-training test than they did in the pre-training test.These electrophysiological changes for the trainees might relate to better abilities of inhibiting redundancy information irrelevant to action anticipation in visual display and acquisition of domain-specific memory chunks due to the badminton training,respectively,which finally led to better kinetic analysis and action anticipation.Furthermore,this effect can last 5 months. |
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