Do experts see it in slow motion? Altered timing of action simulation uncovers domain-specific perceptual processing in expert athletes

Abstract

Abstract:Accurate encoding of the spatio-temporal properties of others' actions is essential for the successful implementation of daily activities and, even more, for successful sportive performance, given its role in movement coordination and action anticipation.Here we investigated whether athletes are provided with special perceptual processing of spatio-temporal properties of familiar sportive actions. Basketball and volleyball players and novices were presented with short video-clips of free basketball throws that were partially occluded ahead of realization and were asked to judge whether a subsequently presented pose was either taken from the same throw depicted in the occluded video (action identification task) or temporally congruent with the expected course of the action during the occlusion period (explicit timing task). Results showed that basketball players outperformed the other groups in detecting action compatibility when the pose depicted earlier or synchronous, but not later phases of the movement as compared to the natural course of the action during occlusion. No difference was obtained for explicit estimations of timing compatibility. This leads us to argue that the timing of simulated actions in the experts might be slower than that of perceived actions ("slow-motion" bias), allowing for more detailed representation of ongoing actions and refined prediction abilities.Response to Reviewers: Dear Dr Vicario, Thank you for the submission of your manuscript "Do experts see it in slow motion? Altered timing of action simulation uncovers domain-specific perceptual processing in expert athletes" to Psychological Research and for your patience in awaiting our decision. I was waiting for one more review, but today decided that I could work with what I hold in hands because we have received the reports from two advisers on your manuscript.Based on the advice received and my own reading of your manuscript, I feel that your manuscript could be reconsidered for publication should you be prepared to incorporate major revisions. YOU ARE KINDLY REQUESTED TO ALSO CHECK THE Powered by Editorial Manager® and ProduXion Manager® from Aries Systems Corporation WEBSITE FOR POSSIBLE REVIEWER ATTACHMENTS!In additon to the comments of the reviewers, you should also please the following conerns that I had when reading your manuscript:1. p. 4. What is a "pavement phase"? # We are sorry for this misspelling. We meant "movement phase". # The paradigm adopted in the implicit task was taken from the occluder paradigm, which we discuss in the introduction section. Indeed, in this task, the manipulation of temporal congruency is orthogonal to the task at hand (e.g., discriminating if the test pose was taken from the same throw of the interrupted video clip), but it still affects performance. This way, it provides an implicit measure of the temporal properties of the simulation processes used to match the stimuli. We have tried to further clarify this issue in the introduction and through the text.. #We used a standard adapt...

The Cognitive Mechanism of the Practice Effect of Time-Based Prospective Memory: The Role of Time Estimation

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Representational Momentum in the Expertise Context: Support for the Theory of Event Coding as an Explanation for Action Anticipation

“…Accordingly, supporting evidence for the TEC also suggests that experience in action planning facilitates the tendency to anticipate similar actions of others toward distal effects when these actions are congruent with those previously learned (Knoblich and Flach, 2001; Wilson and Knoblich, 2005; Prinz, 2006). This suggests that experts acquired a form of anticipatory behavior that is developed as a function of action planning experience, a notion which has been frequently observed in paradigms that have reported expert-novice differences in anticipatory behavior across a variety of sporting expertise domains (Cañal-Bruland et al, 2011; Vicario et al, 2017; Murphy et al, 2018).…”

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