Anticipating action effects with different attention foci is reflected in brain activation

Action-skilled observation: Issues for the study of sport expertise and the brain

With a growing body of research devoted to uncovering regions of the brain implicated in action observation following various action-related experiences, including sport, we ask what we know from this research, and what we still need to know, as it pertains to sport and the brain. To do this, we review and integrate knowledge garnered from developmental work, short-term motor learning studies, and most significantly sport athletes across varying skill levels. We consider various neurophysiological methods, including TMS, fMRI, and EEG, which have been used to help uncover brain regions involved in action-skilled observation. We are particularly interested in how these processes are related to action prediction and the detection of deceptive actions among athlete groups. This research is considered within broad theoretical frameworks related to action-simulation and prediction, although our main focus is on the brain regions that have been implicated in skilled action observation and the implications of this research for knowledge and further study of sport expertise.

Motor-Evoked Potentials in the Lower Back Are Modulated by Visual Perception of Lifted Weight

Facilitation of the primary motor cortex (M1) during the mere observation of an action is highly congruent with the observed action itself. This congruency comprises several features of the executed action such as somatotopy and temporal coding. Studies using reach-grasp-lift paradigms showed that the muscle-specific facilitation of the observer’s motor system reflects the degree of grip force exerted in an observed hand action. The weight judgment of a lifted object during action observation is an easy task which is the case for hand actions as well as for lifting boxes from the ground. Here we investigated whether the cortical representation in M1 for lumbar back muscles is modulated due to the observation of a whole-body lifting movement as it was shown for hand action. We used transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to measure the corticospinal excitability of the m. erector spinae (ES) while subjects visually observed the recorded sequences of a person lifting boxes of different weights from the floor. Consistent with the results regarding hand action the present study reveals a differential modulation of corticospinal excitability despite the relatively small M1 representation of the back also for lifting actions that mainly involve the lower back musculature.

Soccer athletes are superior to non-athletes at perceiving soccer-specific and non-sport specific human biological motion

Recent studies have shown that athletes’ domain specific perceptual-cognitive expertise can transfer to everyday tasks. Here we assessed the perceptual-cognitive expertise of athletes and non-athletes using sport specific and non-sport specific biological motion perception (BMP) tasks. Using a virtual environment, university-level soccer players and university students’ non-athletes were asked to perceive the direction of a point-light walker and to predict the trajectory of a masked-ball during a point-light soccer kick. Angles of presentation were varied for orientation (upright, inverted) and distance (2 m, 4 m, 16 m). Accuracy and reaction time were measured to assess observers’ performance. The results highlighted athletes’ superior ability compared to non-athletes to accurately predict the trajectory of a masked soccer ball presented at 2 m (reaction time), 4 m (accuracy and reaction time), and 16 m (accuracy) of distance. More interestingly, experts also displayed greater performance compared to non-athletes throughout the more fundamental and general point-light walker direction task presented at 2 m (reaction time), 4 m (accuracy and reaction time), and 16 m (reaction time) of distance. In addition, athletes showed a better performance throughout inverted conditions in the walker (reaction time) and soccer kick (accuracy and reaction time) tasks. This implies that during human BMP, athletes demonstrate an advantage for recognizing body kinematics that goes beyond sport specific actions.