Unconscious Response Inhibition Differences Between Table Tennis Athletes And Non-athletes

With the development of unconscious perception,more and more researchers have focused on high-level cognitive function(such as cognitive control).As a part of cognitive control,the existence of unconscious response inhibition has been proven.The recurrent processing theory has been used to explain both unconscious response inhibition and conscious response inhibition.Because weakly masked no-go signal and strongly masked no-go signal travel along similar processing routes in feedforward sweep,so strongly masked no-go signal could trigger inhibitory processes;however,because it is not supported by recurrent processing so this activation of inhibitory processes might die out quickly.Recently,many researchers have focused on athlete’s cognitive ability and they consider some superior cognitive ability is responsible for successful sporting performance.Furthermore,previous studies have shown that athletes from open-skill sport have superior conscious response inhibition than ordinary people.However,whether superior conscious response inhibition is detectable at an early stage(i.e.feedforwrd sweep)remain unclear.In this study,we adopted the masked go/no-go task with event-related potentials(ERPs)to explore the differences between table tennis athletes(n = 20)who are consider having superior conscious response inhibition and non-athletes(n =19)in unconscious response inhibition.At the behavioral level,the results showed that table tennis athletes displayed shorter go response times than non-athletes(p < 0.05)but there were no significant different between the two groups in go and no-go accuracy in the conscious condition(p > 0.05;p > 0.05).In the unconscious condition,no-go trial type elicited longer response times than go trial type(p < 0.001)and table tennis athletes exhibited longer RT-slowing than non-athletes(p < 0.05).At the neural level,no-go trial type elicited significant larger N2 amplitudes and P3 amplitudes than go trail type in the conscious condition(p = 0.001;p < 0.001);table tennis athletes displayed shorter N2 latencies than non-athletes in the conscious condition(p < 0.05);table tennis athletes displayed larger no-go P3 amplitudes than non-athletes in the conscious condition(p < 0.05).No-go trial type elicited larger P3 amplitudes than go trial type in the unconscious condition(p < 0.05);table tennis athletes displayed shorter N2 latencies than non-athletes in the unconscious condition(p < 0.05);table tennis athletes displayed larger no-go P3 amplitudes than non-athletes in the unconscious condition(p < 0.05)Conclusion: The results suggested that table tennis athletes have advantages in unconscious response inhibition over non-athletes and indicated that superior conscious response inhibition is detectable at feedforward sweep.