The Evaluation Of Anticipation Ability For Table Tennis Player:Based On Hick's Law

In the sports domain,open-skill sports required extremely fast responses and expert performers in striking sports can hit objects moving at high speed with incredible precision.By the time pressure for responding,anticipation is essential for success.Using an expert-novice design,a number of investigators also have examined the expert players' superior ability to anticipate ball direction over the novice players.There are two ways of explainning the expert advantage in anticipation skill,including selective attention and integration of sports information resources.Skilled athletes can center our attention on certain important elements of environment and ignore other things,they can also take individual pieces of information(chunks)and group them into larger units.The two ways of explanation suggest that the number of S-R alternatives is less for experts than for novices.To further confirm the hypothesis,we employed a novel cuing task that cuing a nine-choice task with a table tennis video clip.When the landing location of the ball in the cuing video is consistent with the location of response target,it is valid cue.Otherwise it is invalid cue.The landing location of the ball correctly indicated the location of the response target 75% of the time.Based on Hick's law,the number of S-R alternatives was collected in 34 participants,including 17 professional table tennis players and 17 controls.Results revealed that:(1)the Group ×Cue interaction was significant in the processing of serve anticipation,F(2,32)= 5.104,p=0.031,and attacking anticipation,F(2,32)= 7.356,p=0.01.For serve anticipation,both players and controls reduced the number of S-R alternatives to below nine because of anticipatory of table tennis.And players generated smaller number of S-R alternatives than controls,t(32)=-4.312,p < 0.001.For attacking anticipation,only for experts,cued response alternatives were smaller in the validly cued condition than ones in the invalidly cued condition.(2)For novices,there were no significant difference in attention benefit across occlusion point.However,for experts,S-R alternatives gradually decreased with the increase of information amount for anticipation of serve,F(2,48)= 25.746,p<0.01,and anticipation of attacking,F(2,48)= 3.301,p<0.05.The conclusions was that the advantage in expert anticipation is the ability to make use of information to gradually reduce the number of S-R alternatives.