Can Slow-Motion Footage of Forehand Strokes Be Used to Immediately Improve Anticipatory Judgments in Tennis?

Kazunobu Fukuhara,Motonobu Ishii,Bumpei Sato,Hirofumi Ida,Takahiro Higuchi,Tomoko Maruyama,Takahiro Ogata

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01830

Abstract

Slow-motion footage of sports actions is widely used as a visual learning tool in observing the dynamic motor behaviors of athletes. Recent studies on action observation have reported that extending the observation time in slow-motion footage provides benefits of understanding the intention of an opponent’s action, at least when observing rapid movements. As such, the use of slow-motion footage may have the potential to improve the anticipatory judgments of an opponent’s action outcome without training (or feedback). To verify this possibility, we examined the effects of the replay speed of slow-motion footage on the anticipatory judgments of shot directions and recognition of kinematic positions of opponents’ forehand strokes in tennis. Nine skilled and nine novice tennis players were asked to anticipate the direction of their opponent’s shots (left or right) and then attempted to recognize proximal (trunk center) and distal (ball) kinematic positions. Computer graphic animations of forehand strokes were used as visual stimuli, which were presented at four different replay speeds (normal, three-quarter, half, and quarter speeds). We failed to show the immediate effect of the use of slow-motion footage on the anticipatory performance of the skilled and novice players, although the anticipatory performance of the skilled players was superior to that of the novice players. Instead, we found an effect of the use of slow-motion footage in terms of promoting recognition of important kinematic cues (trunk center) for effective anticipation by skilled players. Moreover, no significant correlations were observed between the anticipatory judgments and motion recognition in all experimental conditions. These results suggest that even if the use of slow-motion footage enhances the recognition of key kinematic cues, it may not immediately improve anticipatory judgments in tennis.

Highlights

Slow-motion footage of sports actions is widely used as a visual learning tool in observing complex and quick motor behaviors by athletes, such as a golfer’s swing movement and a tennis player’s forehand stroke (Williams et al, 2002; Wilson, 2008)
The size of motor-evoked potentials of the hand muscles was induced by transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) when participants observed a video footage of an individual catching a ball at three different replay speeds
We evaluated the recognition of kinematic positions using the visual analog scale (VAS)

Summary

Introduction

Slow-motion footage of sports actions is widely used as a visual learning tool in observing complex and quick motor behaviors by athletes, such as a golfer’s swing movement and a tennis player’s forehand stroke (Williams et al, 2002; Wilson, 2008). Recent studies (Moriuchi et al, 2014; Moriuchi et al, 2017) on action observation have reported that extension of the observation time in slow-motion footage provides benefits of understanding the intention of an opponent’s action, at least when observing rapid movements. The authors explained that the benefit of using slow-motion footage is likely to be obtained only for rapid movements, in which the components of observed actions would not be visible at normal speed. There seems to be no benefit in using slow-motion footage for slow movements, for which observers could recognize the components of actions even at normal speed. The use of slow-motion footage should lead to the activation of the action observation network (AON), allowing understanding of an opponent’s action intention (Rizzolatti et al, 2001) when applied to rapid movements

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