| Action processing plays an important role in daily human life.Long-term sports experience can promote an individual’s ability of action processing.They can form expectations of action through their own internal action representation effectively,so as to accurately judge the goal and outcome of actions.In action processing,actions whose results are contrary to previous expectations are called unexpected actions.Previous studies have shown that individuals with sports experience are also more sensitive to unexpected actions that may occur.Therefore,exploring the influence of sports experience on unexpected action processing and its neural activity characteristics can further understand the cognitive advantages of athletes in action processing,and can also provide evidence for the neural mechanism of action processing.This study used a mixed design of 2(sports experience: expert group,control group)×2(action type: expertise action,daily action)×2(congruent: congruency,incongruency).The sports experience is a between-subjects factor.The action type and action consistency are repetitive measured factors.Fifteen snowboarding halfpipe athletes were recruited as the expert group,and 15 college students with no expertise as the control group.The action congruency discrimination task adapted from the occlusal paradigm adaptation was used.During the task,participants are required to watch action video clips,and after a period of masking,judge the congruency between the followup stimulus and the previous action.At the same time,EEG signals were recorded and the performance of the task was scored subjectively.The behavior performance,eventrelated potential activity in action processing,EEG rhythm activity of action viewing and judgment,source of EEG activity were analyzed.The results showed that the performance of sports experts was better than that of the control group,the reaction time was shorter,the accuracy and d’(a measure of sensitivity or discriminability)were higher in expertise action judgment,but there was no significant difference in daily action judgment.In the judgment of special action,only the expert group showed a more negative N400 amplitude in the incongruent action condition than that in the congruent one,and there was no significant N400 effect in daily action judgment in both groups.Reconstruction analysis showed that the difference of N400 activity between the expert group and the control group originated from the extensive frontal regions included superior frontal gyrus,middle frontal gyrus,inferior frontal gyrus,while the difference of N400 activity between the incongruence and congruence in the experts originated from the middle temporal gyrus.The analysis of Theta rhythm activity found that,in the expertise action judgment,the expert group showed stronger Theta rhythm synchronization activity than the control group under the incongruent action condition.The expert group also showed stronger Theta rhythm synchronization activity than the control group before the onset of the target stimulus.Reconstruction analysis found that the differences in Theta rhythm activities between the incongruent and the congruent condition of the expert group originated from the middle frontal gyrus and superior frontal gyrus.In the daily action judgment,there was no significant difference in Theta activity between the two groups.In the action viewing stage,there was no difference in desynchronization of Mu rhythm in sensorimotor area between groups.The desynchronization of Alpha rhythm in the occipital region of the control group was significantly stronger than that of the expert group,and the reconstruction analysis found that the difference came from the activation of extensive visual areas such as the middle occipital gyrus and anterior occipital gyrus.Correlation analysis showed that N400 activity and Theta rhythm synchronization activity were positively correlated with special action behavior performance only in the expert group.Mu rhythm desynchronization activity was negatively correlated with the subjective score of task difficulty,and positively correlated with the self-confidence of special action task performance only in the expert group.The above results show that individual sports experience can promote the processing of unexpected actions,and can be reflected in specific neural activities.Sports experience promotes the individual to process the action at the conceptual semantic level and construct the action meaning,and unexpected action induces a more negative N400 amplitude.Moreover,the sports experience improves the individual’s cognitive preparation in the action processing and strengthens the monitoring of the unexpected action,which is reflected in the stronger Theta rhythm synchronization activities than the control group. |
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