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

Abstract

Fast motor actions in sports often require the ability to discriminate between similar movement patterns (e.g. feint vs. non-feint) at an early stage. Moreover, an athlete might even initiate a motor response without a conscious processing of the relevant movement information. Therefore, the question was raised of whether or not athletes and novices of a particular movement can unconsciously distinguish between similar movement patterns. Using a masked priming experiment (Experiment 1), it is demonstrated that both groups were similarly able to unconsciously distinguish a feint and a non-feint action. To further investigate whether this result is based on perceptual priming effects or on unconscious motor activations, a second masked priming experiment was conducted (Experiment 2). Experiment 2 revealed perceptual priming effects which are not mediated by motor expertise. Moreover, unconscious pictures of feint and non-feint actions from different movement stages are sufficient to activate a motor response in athletes. In novices, a negative congruency effect occurred. For both groups, largest response congruency effects were found for prime pictures participants could consciously perceive as target pictures during the experimental session. The results found here point out that perceptual priming effects are not mediated by motor expertise whereas response priming effects might be.

How to Trick Your Opponent: A Review Article on Deceptive Actions in Interactive Sports

“…These included faking in rugby (Jackson et al, 2006; Brault et al, 2012; Henry et al, 2012; Mori and Shimada, 2013), deceptive soccer moves (Smeeton and Williams, 2012; Bishop et al, 2013; Wright et al, 2013; Wright and Jackson, 2014), faked penalty throws in team handball (Cañal-Bruland and Schmidt, 2009; Cañal-Bruland et al, 2010), fake passes in basketball (Sebanz and Shiffrar, 2009; Weigelt et al, 2016), and disguised actions in tennis (Rowe et al, 2009), beach-volleyball (Güldenpenning et al, 2013), cricket (Adams and Gibson, 1989), and martial arts (Güldenpenning et al, 2015). Notably, there is one study in French boxing, showing that higher skilled boxers produced more false alarms in response to fakes than lower skilled boxers (Ripoll et al, 1995).…”

Peer Review #2 of "Sports experts’ unique perception of time duration based on the processing principle of an integrated model of timing (v0.1)"

“…Thus, the result noted above can be explained by the fact that the sports experts' intense practice improved cognition far beyond what nonexperts can attain. In fact, many studies have already argued that athletes from open-skill sports display better automatic information processing in coping with high time pressure situations than do nonathletes (Guldenpenning et al 2015;Guldenpenning et al 2011). Similarly, You et al (2018) found that table tennis players outperformed nonathletes in regard to response inhibition even in an unconscious condition where the participants were unaware of the stimulus in the task.…”

Forces That Supplement Visuomotor Learning: A “Sensory Crossover” Experiment

“…5). Response priming, when exposure to one experience influences the responses under other conditions, has been shown to be quite useful in a number of applications of human performance and learning [18, 19] and retraining of human ability after brain injury [20]. Catch trials also have the ability to slow down or interfere with learning - in the case of the Visual Rotation Group, null field catch trials can briefly interfere, while for the mixed group, catch trials in the VR condition could either offer an opportunity for priming for visual rotation or make it more difficult to adapt to the force.…”