Abstract
This study investigated the influence of competitive state on cerebral cortex activity of professional shooters with 10 m air rifle before shooting. Generally, professional athletes have higher neural efficiency compared with ordinary people. We recruited 11 national shooters to complete 60 shots under both noncompetitive and competitive shooting conditions, and simultaneously collected their electroencephalogram (EEG) and electrocardiogram (ECG) information. Theta, alpha, and beta power were computed in the last three seconds preceding each shot from average-reference 29-channel EEG, while EEG characteristics under two conditions were analyzed. The results showed a significant linear correlation between shooting accuracy and EEG power of anterior frontal, central, temporal, and occipital regions in beta and theta bands. In addition, the theta power in occipital regions, alpha power in frontal-central and left occipital regions, and beta power in frontal and mid-occipital regions were higher than those in noncompetitive state. However, heart rate (HR) and shooting accuracy did not change significantly under the two conditions. These findings reveal the changes of cortical activity underlying competition shooting as well as providing further understanding of the neural mechanisms of the shooting process and lay a foundation for the subsequent neuromodulation research.
Highlights
It is well known that athletes may suffer different pressures during competition, which may affect their sports performance
Based on the tenets of the multi-action plan (MAP) model, some research explored the neural marker underlying optimal and suboptimal performance experiences of shooters, and suggested that the performance of each functional movement is a combination of different cognitive processes and unique neural patterns, and the optimal and suboptimal performance states were related to different cortical patterns
In order to explore the relationship between EEG activity and shooting performance, multiple regression analysis was conducted with shooting score as the dependent variable and either theta or alpha or beta power under noncompetition as the predictor variable. e multiple regression analysis model was established as follows: y b0 + b1x1 + b2x2 + b3x3 + b4x4, where, x1, x2, x3, and x4, respectively, represent the power of prefrontal, central, temporal, and occipital regions, and the output y represents the shooting score
Summary
It is well known that athletes may suffer different pressures during competition, which may affect their sports performance. Some studies have reported that higher frontal theta activity is related to excellent performance in goal-directed tasks [7, 17, 20]. Ese findings suggest that the theta and alpha power of specific brain regions are related to the accuracy and professionalism of shooting. Lu et al found that a larger oscillatory activity in both the mid-frontal theta and parieto-occipital alpha in experts suggested an adaptive neural preparatory process with highly developed motor skills in complex tasks, characterized by high attentional demands, anticipation of uncertainty, and the integration of multiple visual cues [26]. Some researchers have proposed that competition changes the environment for athletes [27], and from the point of view of improving motor performance, the neural basis underlying competition has been studied by using different methods. We speculated that there was a correlation between the distribution of EEG power and the shooting score
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