Individual Alpha Peak Frequency in Ice Hockey Shooting Performance

Abstract

There are several important inter- and intra-individual variations in individual alpha peak frequency (IAPF) in the cognitive domain. The rationale for the present study was to extend the research on IAPF in the cognitive domain to IAPF in the sport domain. Specifically, the purpose of the present study was twofold: (a) to explore whether baseline IAPF is related to performance in an ice hockey shooting task and (b) to explore whether a shooting task has an effect on IAPF variability. The present investigation is one of the first studies to examine links between IAPF and sport performance. Study results did not show significant changes in IAPF when comparing baseline IAPF and pre- to post-task IAPF across three performance levels. The findings support previous literature in the cognitive domain suggesting that IAPF is a stable neurophysiological marker. Future research should consider the following methodological suggestions: (a) measuring IAPF during sport performance instead of at a resting state, (b) changing the pre-performance resting baseline instructions to take into account sport-specific mental preparation, (c) exploring an expert-novice paradigm to accentuate performance ability differences between groups (d) comparing tasks with different levels of complexity, and (e) analyzing the possible correlation between IAPF and performance on different days.

Dry EEG in Sports Sciences: A Fast and Reliable Tool to Assess Individual Alpha Peak Frequency Changes Induced by Physical Effort

“…The physically demanding nature of the endurance cycling task could explain the discrepancy between our findings and those obtained in a recent study on ice-hockey shooting performance (Christie et al, 2017), where the iAPF was found to be invariant and was related to latent cognitive general factors (Smit et al, 2006; Grandy et al, 2013a, b). Indeed, it has been suggested that an iAPF shift occurs only when strong effort, cardiovascular, and metabolic processes are involved (Billiot et al, 1997; Ng and Raveendran, 2007; Gutmann et al, 2015) such as during an endurance cycling task.…”

“…Therefore, iAPF has been increasingly employed as a neural marker of mental stressful conditions in sport science (Matsunami et al, 2001; Lewis et al, 2007; Seo et al, 2008, 2009), and recent studies reported an iAPF increase after acute physical effort induced by an endurance cycling task, speculating that the observed modulation of the iAPF could be related to exercise-induced activation of the brain’s arousal mechanisms and to enhanced alertness during performance (Gutmann et al, 2015, 2018b). Although there have been cases where no significant changes of iAPF were observed when comparing baseline iAPF with pre- and post-task iAPF (Christie et al, 2017), corroborating the notion that iAPF values are invariant (Grandy et al, 2013b), nonetheless the iAPF was suggested as a useful measure to study fatigue and stress-recovery balance (Bertollo et al, 2017) to prevent dysfunctional states such as overtraining and/or injuries in athletes, and to modulate the individual training load in different sports.…”

A study on EEG feature extraction and classification in autistic children based on singular spectrum analysis method

“…We use this method since the frequency of the alpha rhythm has been shown to be wider than the conventional narrowband fixed bandwidth (8–12 Hz). This method can provide a more accurate peak estimate, especially if multiple peaks are identifiable (Christie et al., 2017; Haegens et al., 2014).…”

Visual Perception and Visuomotor Reaction Speed Are Independent of the Individual Alpha Frequency

“…Since we followed the performance classification approach of Christie et al (2017) for supplementary comparisons between IAF and visuomotor reaction performance, this study was used as an orientation for sample size calculation related to the group comparisons. Although effect sizes were not reported, sample size was calculated based on the group mean and pooled standard deviation.…”

“…However, although Cheron et al (2016) proposed the alpha frequency as a cortical biomarker of performance, research on the IAF in athletes is limited. Currently, the study of Christie et al (2017) is the only one addressing a relation between the athlete's IAF and sport performance. While the differences between athletes on different performance levels did not reach significance, the authors emphasized the need for further research addressing the IAF in groups of greater diversity such as athletes and nonathletes.…”