Athletes and novices are differently capable to recognize feint and non-feint actions

Abstract

Fast motor reactions in sports often require the ability to predict the intended action of an opponent as early as possible. Therefore, the present paper investigates whether beach volleyball athletes are able to recognize different attack hits (i.e. smash vs. poke shot) at an earlier stage of the movement than novices. Beach volleyball athletes and novices took part in a response priming experiment (Experiment 1). Participants had to decide whether a presented target picture depicts a smash or a poke shot. Importantly, the preceding prime pictures were taken from different stages of the movements varying between the jump (beginning of the movements) and the hand-ball contact (end of the movements). Diverging response congruency effects was found for athletes and novices. Athletes were able to recognize at an earlier movement stage than novices which kind of attack hit was shown at the prime picture. It is suggested that athletes might implicitly read movement-related patterns in the depicted athlete's body posture (e.g. the angle of the elbow). In contrast, novices might use information which is easier to access (e.g. hand-ball relation). In a second experiment, novice participants received a visual training to test for a potential perceptual source of the priming effects. Notably, participants did not improve their ability to differentiate the volleyball techniques, indicating that a better recognition performance in athletes is based on motor and not on perceptual expertise.

Masked priming of complex movements: perceptual and motor processes in unconscious action perception

“…Therefore, Sebanz and Shiffrar (2009) argue that experts' prediction superiority is selective for dynamic displays. However, a recent study of Güldenpenning, Steinke, Koester, and Schack (2013) indicates that athletes were also able to outperform novices when judging static movement information (i.e. pictures).…”

Control over the processing of the opponent’s gaze direction in basketball experts

“…To disguise the opponent means that the actor tries to minimize any informative cues of the action that he/she intends to perform. An attacking volleyball player, for example, might for as long as possible try to hide whether he/she wants to smash or lob the ball (Güldenpenning, Steinke, Koester, & Schack, 2013). The challenge for the opponent is to infer the true action intention based on the reduced information available.…”

Priming of hand and foot response: is spatial attention to the body site enough?

“…For example, the ability to perform a specialized set of motor skills results in increased perceptual accuracy when observing and discriminating the corresponding actions. This has been shown for basketball players predicting whether or not a shot was going to be on target (Aglioti, Cesari, Romani, & Urgesi, 2008; see also Güldenpenning, Steinke, Koester, & Schack, 2013 for a similar result in volleyball players), ballet dancers discriminating biological motion using point-light ballet moves (Calvo-Merino, Ehrenberg, Leung, & Haggard, 2010), and for visual discrimination of newly learned gait patterns (Casile & Giese, 2006). Also, neural activity in visuomotor areas tends to be stronger for movements that are in the observer's motor repertoire (Calvo-Merino, Glaser, Grèzes, Passingham, & Haggard, 2005; see also CalvoMerino, Grèzes, Glaser, Passingham, & Haggard, 2006;Cross, Hamilton, & Grafton, 2006;Cross, Hamilton, Kraemer, Kelley, & Grafton, 2009a;Cross, Kraemer, Hamilton, Kelley, & Grafton, 2009b).…”