Abstract
Studying the way athletes predict actions of their peers during fast-ball sports, such as a tennis, has proved to be a valuable tool for increasing our knowledge of intention understanding. The working model in this area is that the anticipatory representations of others' behaviors require internal predictive models of actions formed from pre-established and shared representations between the observer and the actor. This model also predicts that observers would not be able to read accurately the intentions of a competitor if the competitor were to perform the action without prior knowledge of their intention until moments before the action. To test this hypothesis, we recorded brain activity from 25 male tennis players while they performed a novel behavioral tennis intention inference task, which included two conditions: (i) one condition in which they viewed video clips of a tennis athlete who knew in advance where he was about to act/serve (initially intended serves) and (ii) one condition in which they viewed video clips of that same athlete when he did not know where he was to act/serve until the target was specified after he had tossed the ball into the air to complete his serve (non-initially intended serves). Our results demonstrated that (i) tennis expertise is related to the accuracy in predicting where another server intends to serve when that server knows where he intends to serve before (but not after) he tosses the ball in the air; and (ii) accurate predictions are characterized by the recruitment of both cortical areas within the human mirror neuron system (that is known to be involved in higher-order (top-down) processes of embodied cognition and shared representation) and subcortical areas within brain regions involved in procedural memory (caudate nucleus). Interestingly, inaccurate predictions instead recruit areas known to be involved in low-level (bottom-up) computational processes associated with the sense of agency and self-other distinction.
Highlights
“If there is something you don’t want to be on a tennis court, it is predictable,”
Behavioral tennis IIT (tIIT) results As predicted, the behavioral results showed that the observers were better at predicting initially intended serves, Initially Intended Serve (IIS) (64.16% correct, SD = 0.099) than non-initially intended serves, Non-Initially Intended Serve (NIIS) [52.40% correct, SD = 0.099; F(1, 24) = 25.387; p < .001; d = 1.18]
A post-hoc paired t-test conducted to see if reaction times were different between IIS and NIIS for incorrect responses revealed no differences in reaction times between the two serve conditions [MIIS. incorrect = 5622.75 ms, SD = 418.99; MNIIS. incorrect = 5636.25 ms, SD = 438.77; t(24) = −0.61; p = .55; d = −0.031]
Summary
“If there is something you don’t want to be on a tennis court, it is predictable,”. The way in which athletes read and anticipate the actions of their opponent during fast-ball sports, such as a tennis, is a challenging and complex process that is a remarkable feat in itself. The past decade has been characterized by a growing body of research dedicated to better understand the factors playing a role in anticipation and predictive skills in fast-ball sports, very few studies have examined their underlying neural mechanisms (e.g., Wright and Jackson, 2007). Relative to a passive condition, action prediction recruited notably a frontoparietal network (Wright and Jackson, 2007), which is known to involve the putative human mirror neuron system (hMNS; Grafton et al, 1996; Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia, 2008; Rizzolatti and Fogassi, 2014) They extended this result by demonstrating that experts, compared to novices, tend to show stronger brain activation within the hMNS for early-occluded than for late-occluded time sequences of a tennis shot (Wright and Jackson, 2007). Theories of embodied cognition and simulation suggest that the emulation of these two brain networks contributes to the capacity to read and predict the intentions of others
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