Abstract
To program proper reactions, athletes must anticipate opponents’ actions on the basis of previous visuomotor experience. In particular, such abilities seem to rely on processing others’ intentions to act. We adopted a new approach based on an attentional spatial compatibility paradigm to investigate how elite volleyball players elaborate both spatial and motor information at upper-limb posture presentation. Forty-two participants (18 volleyball players and 17 nonathlete controls assigned to Experiments 1 a and b, and eight basketball players assigned to Experiment 2) were tested to study their ability to process the intentions to act conveyed by hands and extract motor primitives (i.e., significant components of body movements). Analysis looked for a spatial compatibility effect between direction of the spike action (correspondence factor) and response side for both palm and back of the hand (view factor). We demonstrated that volleyball players encoded spatial sport-related indices from bodily information and showed preparatory motor activation according to the direction of the implied spike actions for the palm view (Experiment 1; hand simulating a cross-court spike, p = 0.013, and a down-the-line spike, p = 0.026) but both nonathlete controls (Experiment 1; both p < 0.05) and other sports athletes (basketball players, Experiment 2; p = 0.34, only cross-court spike) did not. Results confirm that elite players’ supremacy lies in the predictive abilities of coding elementary motor primitives for their sport discipline.
Highlights
The ability to anticipate events and actions in sports is essential to interact with the environment effectively [1,2,3]
We analysed the data for the two groups separately to check for a significant correspondence × view interaction based on a spatial compatibility effect between the direction of the action and the facilitated motor response
Athletes showed a compatibility effect based on the direction of the attack action for palm hands
Summary
The ability to anticipate events and actions in sports is essential to interact with the environment effectively [1,2,3]. In addition to being a necessary ability in daily life, its role is paramount in sport situations where good athletes intercept the trajectory of moving objects by anticipating either opponents’ or playmates’ actions. “when” the ball will be thrown on the basis of information extracted from movements of the opponent, even before the ball has begun its trajectory [6,7,8] This is a necessary ability as athletes, using their perceptual expertise, need to intercept the ball at the right place and at the right time as there are frequent exchanges in ball possession and players must respond to them by making decisions whether they are in possession or not of the ball [9]
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