The main objectives of this study were (a) to elucidate young tennis players' use of music to manipulate emotional states, and (b) to present a model grounded in present data to illustrate this phenomenon and to stimulate further research. Anecdotal evidence suggests that music listening is used regularly by elite athletes as a preperformance strategy, but only limited empirical evidence corroborates such use. Young tennis players (N = 14) were selected purposively for interview and diary data collection. Results indicated that participants consciously selected music to elicit various emotional states; frequently reported consequences of music listening included improved mood, increased arousal, and visual and auditory imagery. The choice of music tracks and the impact of music listening were mediated by a number of factors, including extramusical associations, inspirational lyrics, music properties, and desired emotional state. Implications for the future investigation of preperformance music are discussed.

We examined the effect of expertise on cortical activation during sports anticipation using fMRI. In Experiment 1, while recreational players predicted badminton stroke direction, the pattern of active clusters was consistent with a proposed perception-of-action network. This pattern was not replicated in a stimulus-matched, action-unrelated control task. In Experiment 2, players of three different skill levels anticipated stroke direction from clips occluded either 160ms before or 80ms after racquet-shuttle contact. Early-occluded sequences produced more activation than lateoccluded overall, in most cortical regions of interest, but experts showed an additional enhancement in medial, dorsolateral and ventrolateral frontal cortex. Anticipation in open-skill sports engages cortical areas integral to observing and understanding others' actions; such activity is enhanced in experts.

Badminton players of varying skill levels viewed normal and point-light video clips of opponents striking the shuttle towards the viewer; their task was to predict in which quadrant of the court the shuttle would land. In a whole-brain fMRI analysis we identified bilateral cortical networks sensitive to the anticipation task relative to control stimuli. This network is more extensive and localised than previously reported. Voxel clusters responding more strongly in experts than novices were associated with all task-sensitive areas, whereas voxels responding more strongly in novices were found outside these areas. Task-sensitive areas for normal and point-light video were very similar, whereas early visual areas responded differentially, indicating the primacy of kinematic information for sport-related anticipation.

Our understanding of how experts integrate prior situation-specific information (i.e., contextual priors) with emergent visual information when performing dynamic and temporally constrained tasks is limited. We use a soccer-based anticipation task to examine the ability of expert and novice players to integrate prior information about an opponent's action tendencies with unfolding environmental information such as opponent kinematics. We recorded gaze behaviours and ongoing expectations during task performance. Moreover, we assessed their final anticipatory judgements and perceived levels of cognitive effort invested. Explicit contextual priors biased the allocation of visual attention and shaped ongoing expectations in experts, but not in novices. When the final action was congruent with the most likely action given the opponent's action tendencies, the contextual priors enhanced the final judgements for both groups. For incongruent trials, the explicit priors had a negative impact on the final judgements of novices, but not experts. We interpret the data using a Bayesian framework to provide novel insights into how contextual priors and dynamic environmental information are combined when making decisions under time pressure. Moreover, we provide evidence that this integration is governed by the temporal relevance of the information at hand as well as the ability to infer this relevance.

The aim of this study was to examine the neural bases for perceptual-cognitive superiority in a soccer anticipation task using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Thirty-nine participants lay in an MRI scanner while performing a video-based task in which they predicted an oncoming opponent's movements. Video clips were occluded at four time points, and participants were grouped according to in-task performance. Early occlusion reduced prediction accuracy significantly for all participants, as did the opponent's execution of a deceptive maneuver; however, high-skill participants were significantly more accurate than their low-skill counterparts under deceptive conditions. This perceptual-cognitive superiority was associated with greater activation of cortical and subcortical structures involved in executive function and oculomotor control. The contributions of the present findings to an existing neural model of anticipation in sport are highlighted.