What boxing-related stimuli reveal about response behaviour

Abstract

When two athletes meet inside the ropes of the boxing ring to fight, their cognitive systems have to respond as quickly as possible to a manifold of stimuli to assure victory. In the present work, we studied the pre-attentive mechanisms, which form the basis of an athlete's ability in reacting to an opponent's punches. Expert boxers, beginner boxers and people with no experience of boxing performed a Simon-like task where they judged the colour of the boxing gloves worn by athletes in attack postures by pressing two lateralised keys. Although participants were not instructed to pay attention to the direction of the punches, beginner boxers' responses resembled a defence-related pattern, expert boxers' resembled counterattacks, whereas non-athletes' responses were not influenced by the unrelated task information. Results are discussed in the light of an expertise-related action simulation account.

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“…Our approach expands information about possibilities of application of Hatha yoga exercises (Gorelov, et al, 2013). Application of boxing as a mean of youth's health improvement is presented in researches (Lennox, 2012;El Ashker, 2012;Ottoboni, et al, 2015;Scandurra, 2015). The authors show potentials of social organization of boxing clubs' functioning on example of young people, who attend boxing clubs every day after classes in educational establishments.…”

“…Results of the conducted research permitted to specify the data about prospects of students' more effective and conscious participation in improvement of main health indicators through practicing of definite kind of sports (Gorelov, et al, 2013;Giovanis, Aschenbrenner, & Erdmann, 2013;Ottoboni, Russo, Tessari, 2015). It permits to positively influence on medical-biological and psychological-pedagogical health indicators (Purzycka, Prusik, Bohdan, et al, 2011;Eynon, Banting, Ruiz, et al, 2014;Levandovskaya, & Prusik, 2014).…”

Development of a Taekwondo Combat Model Based on Markov Analysis

“…In combat sports, when an athlete performs an attack (level 1), the opponent can answer by defending (Patterns I, III, IV, and VIII) or counterattacking (Patterns II, V, VI, VII, IX, X, and XI) (Ottoboni et al, 2014) which corresponds to the level 2 in our tactical scheme. These tactical responses have been classified as defensive or offensive combat styles, respectively (Downey, 2007).…”

Exposing an “Intangible” Cognitive Skill Among Collegiate Football Players: II. Enhanced Response Impulse Control

“…A large body of research has emerged over the past two to three decades that has revealed the power of the prototypical Simon task and its variants to identify deficits in impulse control associated with different types of neurological [e.g., Parkinson’s disease: van Wouwe et al, 2016 ; Servant et al, 2018 ; Tourette’s: Wylie et al, 2013 ] or psychiatric [Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD): Ridderinkhof et al, 2005 ] disorders. In contrast to this large literature, we are aware of only a small number of studies designed with the express purpose of assessing this type of control in highly skilled athletes, who may possess superior control, using variants of the conventional Simon task [ bowling ( Braem et al, 2015 ); boxing ( Ottoboni et al, 2015 ); also see Davranche et al (2009) for the influence of physical exercise intensity and response effector (foot) on the properties of Simon effect in elite white-water kayakers ]. This relative scarcity of basic research may be reflective of controversy in cognitive sports science about the degree to which basic cognitive skills assessed using conventional laboratory tasks, like the Eriksen flanker task and the Simon task, rather than sport-specific laboratory tasks, like action anticipation tasks that require speeded reactions to videos of players simulating game-like actions, are predictive of the on-field performance of athletes at any level, particularly those who must utilize their cognitive skills in visually dynamic environments (for review see Ward et al, 2017 ).…”

“…However, the RT literature is mixed. That is, athletes have been found to be faster than (e.g., Kida et al, 2005 ; Yamashiro et al, 2013 ; Ottoboni et al, 2015 ; Bianco et al, 2017a , b ; Guo et al, 2017 ; Wang et al, 2017 ), comparable to (e.g., Wang et al, 2013 ; Sanchez-Lopez et al, 2014 ; Yamashiro et al, 2015 ; Wylie et al, 2018 ), or slower than ( Ottoboni et al, 2015 ) controls in their response speeds [see Nakamoto and Mori (2008) for task-specific varied outcomes]. Our finding that DI collegiate football players and controls did not differ in either overall RT or accuracy on the Eriksen flanker task led us to predict that there would be no overall differences between the two groups on either measure in the Simon task.…”