Neural Efficiency in Expert Cognitive-Motor Performers During Affective Challenge

Abstract

Skilled individuals demonstrate a spatially localized or relatively lower response in brain activity characterized as neural efficiency when performing within their domain of expertise. Elite athletes are experts in their chosen sport and thus must be not only adept in the motor domain but must be resilient to performing under the stress of high-level competition. Such stability of performance suggests this population processes emotion and mental stress in an adaptive and efficient manner. This study sought to determine if athletes with a history of successful performance under circumstances of mental stress demonstrate neural efficiency during affective challenges compared to age-matched controls. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, the blood-oxygen level-dependent response was recorded during emotional challenge induced by sport-specific and general unpleasant images. The athletes demonstrated neural efficiency in brain regions critical to emotion regulation (prefrontal cortex) and affect (insula) independently of their domain of expertise, suggesting adaptive processing of negative events and less emotional reactivity to unpleasant stimuli.

Neural Efficiency in Athletes: A Systematic Review

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Visual Perturbation to Enhance Return to Sport Rehabilitation after Anterior Cruciate Ligament Injury: A Clinical Commentary

“…22 Neural efficiency refers to the reduced neural activity requirements of experts to perform a learned skill or task relative to novices, suggesting relative magnitude of neural activity scales with expertise and the ability to handle more complex coordination or environmental perturbations. [75][76][77][78] The lack of neural efficiency and associated frontal region activity is corroborated with electroencephalography (EEG), indicating increased frontal theta power during force control and joint position tasks in patients with ACL-R ~one year post-surgery compared to uninjured controls. 20,21 Frontal Theta power is an indicator of focused attention and task complexity, 20 which may indicate that simple knee force control and joint position tasks are more complex and require greater attention for patients with ACL-R. Additionally, EEG has revealed that patients with ACL-D require more cognition/attention resources relative to healthy controls during walking, running and landing tasks as evidenced by significant increases in delta, theta, alpha, and beta band power, as well as asymmetry of the beta band power across the frontal and parietal lobes during jogging and landing.…”

Neural Efficiency and Acquired Motor Skills: An fMRI Study of Expert Athletes

“…In another study, table tennis athletes showed less neural activation in task-related brain regions during a go/no-go visual-spatial task (Guo et al, 2017). Athletes also showed less neural activation in prefrontal cortex and insula during affective challenges than controls (Costanzo et al, 2016). These discrepancies may be related to the between-group paradigm (experts vs. novices), which entangles individual differences with neural dynamics.…”