Functional imaging of cortical responses in expert and novice badminton players while predicting the direction of a badminton stroke

Abstract

Event Abstract Back to Event Functional imaging of cortical responses in expert and novice badminton players while predicting the direction of a badminton stroke Michael Wright1* 1 Brunel University, Centre for Cognition and Neuroimaging, United Kingdom Abernethy et al. [1] showed that expert badminton players use the kinematic information of the opponent’s body movement to predict the direction of a stroke. We compared the fMRI BOLD response of expert and novice badminton players viewing 2 s video clips of an opposing player. Their task was to indicate by button press, where, of 4 possible court positions, a shot was directed. Separate blocks of 5 trials contained sequences occluded (a)160 ms before or (b) 80 ms after the racquet-shuttle contact; and (c) ´no-shot’control clips. A second version of the task used point-light stimuli. We tested 12 national or international level badminton players, 11 club players and 13 occasional players. We quantified the fMRI t-contrasts, for experimental conditions relative to controls, as % signal change in 9 paired (L & R hemisphere) regions of interest [2]. ANOVA revealed main effects of expertise in supplementary eye field, SEF (p < .005), supplementary motor area, SMA: ( p < .01), in two regions of inferior frontal gyrus: BA45 (p < .05) and BA47 (p < .05), and in inferior parietal lobule (p < .01). There was also a significant interaction between expertise and level of occlusion in SEF (p < .01) and in BA45 (p < .005) and BA47 (p < .005); such that experts showed proportionally greater activation in the pre-contact occlusion condition. In V5/MT, expert and novice responses were not significantly different. Full video and point-light versions of the task yielded very similar results. For experts, the pre-contact occlusion stimuli were strongly differentiated from control stimuli in SEF and in inferior frontal gyrus. This is consistent with these regions’ involvement in experts’ superior ability to analyse or model the kinematic information of an opponent’s body movement.