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.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Abernethy B, Russell DG (1984) Advance cue utilisation by skilled cricket batsmen. Aust J Sci Med Sport 16(2):2–10
Abernethy B, Russell DG (1987) Expert-novice differences in an applied selective attention task. J Sport Psychol 9(4):326–345
Abernethy B, Schorer J, Jackson RC, Hagemann N (2012) Perceptual training methods compared: the relative efficacy of different approaches to enhancing sport-specific anticipation. J Exp Psychol-Appl 18(2):143–153. doi:10.1037/A0028452
Aglioti SM, Cesari P, Romani M, Urgesi C (2008) Action anticipation and motor resonance in elite basketball players. Nat Neurosci 11(9):1109–1116
Bläsing B, Tenenbaum G, Schack T (2009) The cognitive structure of movements in classical dance. Psychol Sport Exerc 10(3):350–360
Calvo-Merino B, Grezes J, Glaser DE, Passingham RE, Haggard P (2006) Seeing or doing? Influence of visual and motor familiarity in action observation. Curr Biol 16(19):1905–1910
Canal-Bruland R, Schmidt M (2009) Response bias in judging deceptive movements. Acta Psychol 130(3):235–240
Canal-Bruland R, van der Kamp J, van Kesteren J (2010) An examination of motor and perceptual contributions to the recognition of deception from others’ actions. Hum Mov Sci 29(1):94–102
Casile A, Giese MA (2006) Nonvisual motor training influences biological motion perception. Curr Biol 16(1):69–74
Dehaene S, Naccache L, Le Clec’H G, Koechlin E, Mueller M, Dehaene-Lambertz G, van de Moortele PF, Le Bihan D (1998) Imaging unconscious semantic priming. Nature 395(6702):597–600
Güldenpenning I, Koester D, Kunde W, Weigelt M, Schack T (2011) Motor expertise modulates the unconscious processing of human body postures. Exp Brain Res 213(4):383–391
Güldenpenning I, Kunde W, Weigelt M, Schack T (2012) Priming of future states in complex motor skills. Exp Psychol 59(5):286–294. doi:10.1027/1618-3169/A000156
Hagemann N, Strauss B, Canal-Bruland R (2006) Training perceptual skill by orienting visual attention. J Sport Exerc Psychol 28(2):143–158
Huys R, Canal-Bruland R, Hagemann N, Beek PJ, Smeeton NJ, Williams AM (2009) Global information pickup underpins anticipation of tennis shot direction. J Mot Behav 41(2):158–170
Jackson RC, Warren S, Abernethy B (2006) Anticipation skill and susceptibility to deceptive movements. Acta Psychol 123(3):355–371
Kunde W, Kiesel A, Hoffmann J (2003) Conscious control over the content of unconscious cognition. Cognition 88(2):223–242
Mann DTY, Williams AM, Ward P, Janelle CM (2007) Perceptual-cognitive expertise in sport: a meta-analysis. J Sport Exerc Psychol 29(4):457–478
Morris PH, Lewis D (2010) Tackling diving: the perception of deceptive intentions in association football (Soccer). J Nonverbal Behav 34(1):1–13
Müller S, Abernethy B (2006) Batting with occluded vision: an in situ examination of the information pick-up and interceptive skills of high- and low-skilled cricket batsmen. J Sci Med Sport 9(6):446–458
Neumann O, Klotz W (1994) Motor responses to nonreportable, masked stimuli: where is the limit of direct parameter specification. In: Umilta C, Moscovitch M (eds) Attention and performance XV. Conscious and nonconscious information processing. MIT Press, Cambridge, pp 123–150
Prinz W (1997) Perception and action planning. Eur J Cogn Psychol 9(2):129–154
Raab M, Johnson J (2008) Implicit learning as a means to intuitive decision making in sports. In: Plessner H, Betsch C, Betsch T (eds) Intuition in judgement and decision making. Taylor and Franics Group, New York, pp 119–133
Rowe RM, McKenna FP (2001) Skilled anticipation in real-world tasks: measurement of attentional demands in the domain of tennis. J Exp Psychol Appl 7(1):60–67
Schack T (2012) Measuring mental representations. In: Tenenbaum G, Eklund RC, Kamata A (eds) Measurement in sport and exercise psychology. Human Kinetics, Champaign, IL, pp 203–214
Schack T, Mechsner F (2006) Representation of motor skills in human long-term memory. Neurosci Lett 391(3):77–81
Schorer J, Loffing F, Hagemann N, Baker J (2012) Human handedness in interactive situations: negative perceptual frequency effects can be reversed! J Sport Sci 30(5):507–513. doi:10(1080/02640414),2012,654811
Schütz-Bosbach S, Prinz W (2007) Prospective coding in event representation. Cogn Process 8(2):93–102. doi:10.1007/s10339-007-0167-x
Sebanz N, Shiffrar M (2009) Detecting deception in a bluffing body: the role of expertise. Psychon Bull Rev 16(1):170–175
Shim J, Carlton LG, Chow JW, Chae WS (2005) The use of anticipatory visual cues by highly skilled tennis players. J Motor Behav 37(2):164–175
Urgesi C, Maieron M, Avenanti A, Tidoni E, Fabbro F, Aglioti SM (2010) Simulating the future of actions in the human corticospinal system. Cereb Cortex 20(11):2511–2521. doi:10.1093/cercor/bhp292
Williams AM, Ward P (2007) Anticipation and decision-making: exploring new horizons. In: Tenenbaum G, Eklund R (eds) Handbook of sport psychology. Wiley, New York, pp 203–223
Williams AM, Huys R, Canal-Bruland R, Hagemann N (2009) The dynamical information underpinning anticipation skill. Hum Mov Sci 28(3):362–370
Conflict of interest
The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Güldenpenning, I., Steinke, A., Koester, D. et al. Athletes and novices are differently capable to recognize feint and non-feint actions. Exp Brain Res 230, 333–343 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-013-3658-2
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-013-3658-2