Abstract
The most efficient way to acquire motor skills may be through physical practice. Nevertheless, it has also been shown that action observation may improve motor performance. The aim of the present pilot study was to examine a potential action observation paradigm used to (1) capture the superior performance of expert athletes and (2) capture the underlying neural mechanisms of successful action observation in relation to task experience. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure regional blood flow while presenting videos of a hockey player shooting a puck toward a hockey goal. The videos (a total of 120) where stopped at different time frames with different amount of information provided, creating a paradigm with three different levels of difficulty to decide the fate of a shot. Since this was only a pilot study, we first tested the paradigm behaviorally on six elite expert hockey players, five intermediate players, and six non-hockey playing controls. The results showed that expert hockey players were significantly (p < 0.05) more accurate on deciding the fate of the action compared to the others. Thus, it appears as if the paradigm can capture superior performance of expert athletes (aim 1). We then tested three of the hockey players and three of the controls on the same paradigm in the MRI scanner to investigate the underlying neural mechanisms of successful action anticipation. The imaging results showed that when expert hockey players observed and correctly anticipated situations, they recruited motor and temporal regions of the brain. Novices, on the other hand, relied on visual regions during observation and prefrontal regions during action decision. Thus, the results from the imaging data suggest that different networks of the brain are recruited depending on task experience (aim 2). In conclusion, depending on the level of motor skill of the observer, when correctly anticipating actions different neural systems will be recruited.
Highlights
The most efficient way to acquire motor skills may be through extensive motor training
Motor performance via motor skill training relies on the creation of internal motor representations, which enable us to repeat and, thereby, strengthen learned motor skills and improve performance (Dushanova and Donoghue, 2010)
Three participants from the expert group and three participants from the novice group participated in the functional magnetic resonance imaging part of this pilot
Summary
The most efficient way to acquire motor skills may be through extensive motor training. It has been shown that action observation may be used to enhance motor performance (Mattar and Gribble, 2005). If observing a movement recruits the motor representation, the representation itself may be strengthened, which may lead to performance improvements. In a related field to action observation, motor imagery, accessing the motor representation is central. For example Calvo-Merino et al (2005) showed that professional dancers could only recruit the mirror neuron regions of the brain when watching dance moves within their own motor repertoire. Studies of anticipatory skills in badminton showed how experts are superior compared to novices in anticipating the landing position of strokes, which required fine tuned mechanisms in order to pick up information from the player’s body kinematics
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