The Cognitive Processing Characteristics Of Balance Control In Skill Athletes

Balance control has been defined as the control of the body's position in space for the purposes of balance and orientation.It helps to adjust and maintain the stable posture when suffers the external disturbance,and balance control is also the basis of all motor skills.An excellent level of balance control plays a key role for a good performance in skill sports.The balance control is always accompanied by cognitive regulation,and cognitive ability has a certain regulating effect on balance control.Some researchers have found that skilled athletes have better balance control than the average person.However,most previous studies have compared the behavioral aspects of athletes' control ability under a single balance control task,but ignored the regulating effect of cognitive process on athletes' balance control.However,executive function is a high-level cognitive function,and people's daily cognitive activities are inseparable from the role and coordination of executive function.It is generally believed that the executive function consists of three sub-components,namely,the inhibition process,the working memory updating process and the attention switching process.These cognitive processes play an important role in promoting athletes' performance during training and competition.Therefore,how do different executive function sub-components regulate the balance control performance of skilled athletes? And what are the characteristics of the utilization and distribution of attention resources in the brain during this process? This is the main core scientific problem that this research will solve.In present study,we apply the dual-task paradigm to investigate the skill athletes' balance control perfromance under the effect of inhibitory control,updating processing and cognitive flexibility processes respectively in the framework of executive function.Meanwile,Meanwhile,the electroencephalogram was used to explore the characteristics of the allocation and use of attentional resources in skill athletes' brain.This study is not only beneficial to understand the mechanism of balance control in skilled athletes,but also can provide some reference for the prevention of falling and injury risk,including sports talents selection and motor control training.In Experiment 1,we investigate whether skill athletes perform better compare to ordinary people in the balance control under the effect of inhibitory processing.In Experiment 2,from the perspective of working memory,we investigate the balance control in skill athletes under different difficulties of updating task.In Experiment 3,from the cognitive flexibility,we investigate the attentional resource utilization and regulation mechanism of balance control in skill athletes under the effect of task-switching.The results show that,in three experiments athletes had better balance control level than controls under the three postural conditions.In Experiment 1,two groups of P3 component in athletes is also higher than that in controls.In Experiment 2,the d'of athletes in N-back task was higher than that of controls,in athletes,the stability of balance control was improved in the task with higher difficulty,the updating performance of controls improved with more difficult postural condition.EEG results show that the peak of N1 component in athletes was higher than that in controls under the tandam and sigle leg condition.The peak of P2 component in athletes was higher than that in controls under the feet together condition.The Alpha power in athletes was lower than that in controls under feet together and tandam conditions.In Experiment 3,comparing to controls,the athletes showed higher accuracy of task-switching in cognitive task,in controls,the COP(Centre of Pressure)was more stable as the posture became more difficult.In terms of EEG results,the athletes showed higher peak of N1 component than controls under three postural conditions.The peak of N2 component in athletes was higher than that in controls under the feet together and single leg conditions.While in feet together condition,the athletes showed higher P2 component than controls.In addition,the athletes showed higher Theta power under the feet together and single leg conditions.showed comparable performance in Go/Nogo task,ERP results show that the N1 component in athletes was greater than that in controls,and the difference was more significant as the difficulty of postural condition increased.At the same time,the peakBased on the above results,we got the following three conclusions:(1)Skilled athletes have higher balance control ability.The results show that the athletes keep the discrimination of external stimuli under different control difficulty conditions and have higher flexibility of attention switching.(2)The balance control performance of skill athletes is affected by the updating difficulty of working memory,which shows that the stability of balance control is still improved when the updating task is more difficult.This phenomenon reflects the relatively high degree of automation of balance control in skilled athletes,which is embodied in saving more attention to the use of resources and allocating to the process of cognitive tasks.(3)Skilled athletes have stronger cognitive adjustment ability in the process of balance control.The results showed that they were able to maintain a high level of balance control while gaining advantages in cognitive performance under different cognitive tasks.Their brain processing characteristics reflect that with the increase in the difficulty of balance control,athletes in skills can realize the flexible allocation and rational use of brain attention resources by increasing the input of attention resources in the early stage of stimulus discrimination and increasing the activation level of the frontal brain region.