The Sport Expert’s Attention Superiority on Skill-related Scene Dynamic by the Activation of left Medial Frontal Gyrus: An ERP and LORETA Study

Abstract

Extensive studies have shown that a sports expert is superior to a sports novice in visually perceptual-cognitive processes of sports scene information, however the attentional and neural basis of it has not been thoroughly explored. The present study examined whether a sport expert has the attentional superiority on scene information relevant to his/her sport skill, and explored what factor drives this superiority. To address this problem, EEGs were recorded as participants passively viewed sport scenes (tennis vs. non-tennis) and negative emotional faces in the context of a visual attention task, where the pictures of sport scenes or of negative emotional faces randomly followed the pictures with overlapping sport scenes and negative emotional faces. ERP results showed that for experts, the evoked potential of attentional competition elicited by the overlap of tennis scene was significantly larger than that evoked by the overlap of non-tennis scene, while this effect was absent for novices. The LORETA showed that the experts' left medial frontal gyrus (MFG) cortex was significantly more active as compared to the right MFG when processing the overlap of tennis scene, but the lateralization effect was not significant in novices. Those results indicate that experts have attentional superiority on skill-related scene information, despite intruding the scene through negative emotional faces that are prone to cause negativity bias toward their visual field as a strong distractor. This superiority is actuated by the activation of left MFG cortex and probably due to self-reference.

Attentional bias during emotional processing: Behavioral and electrophysiological evidence from an Emotional Flanker Task

“…The flanker effect reported by Horstmann et al [24] relying on the methodology devised by Ericksen and Ericksen [39] is linked to the emotional saliency of threat-related flankers, which increases the response time to stimuli presented as targets [3,67]. Here, we corroborated such an effect with an Emotional Flanker Task [27] and sought evidence of the neural underpinnings of such a threat-related attentional bias.…”

“…Publications contributing evidence on covert/overt attention mechanisms, which are the most relevant to the present study, reported the use of a variety of stimuli including IAPS Images [33][34][35][36][37][38], Chinese proverbs [37], other affective pictures like sports or body expressions [39,40], arousing or aversive sounds with images [13,41,42], manipulated photos of participants [43], or faces [44,45]. As it had been previously noted by [32], the majority of the reviewed studies found evidence of greater exogenous attention to emotional than to neutral distractors.…”

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

“…For instance, a review by Yarrow et al (2009) concluded that sports experts show superior performance in perception, anticipation and decision making and that this superior performance is task specific and dependent on extensive practice. In addition, many other studies have revealed that sports experts outperform nonathletes in attention and memory for expertise-related tasks (Ericsson & Kintsch 1995;He et al 2018). Consequently, the advantages that sports experts hold in perception, attention and memory facilitate the extraction of information from expertise-related stimuli, causing them to perceive longer durations than nonathletes.…”

“…Manuscript to be reviewed from a given stimulus, the longer the perceived duration. Based on this proposal, sports experts, as a group with especially efficient information extraction in expertise-related tasks owing to their well-researched cognitive advantage (Ericsson & Kintsch 1995;Ericsson & Lehmann 1996;Feng et al 2017;He et al 2018;Wei & Luo 2010;Yarrow et al 2009), should perceive a longer duration than people who lack such expertise when they view an expertise-related stimulus. However, this prediction has not yet been tested.…”

Body-Posture Recognition by Undergraduate Students Majoring in Physical Education and Other Disciplines

“…Regular engagement in sport and exercise improves general cognitive functioning and shapes the functional aspects of the human brain (Kramer and Erickson, 2007;Curlik and Shors, 2013). Previous studies have found that athletes perform better than non-athletes in behavioral tasks targeted at memory, attention allocation, attention flexibility, and executive function (Mann et al, 2007;He et al, 2018;Ishihara et al, 2018). Specifically, meta-analytic reviews have found that sports experts show faster and more accurate performance in regard to spatial memory, visual search tasks, and attentional paradigms (Mann et al, 2007;Voss et al, 2010).…”