The Neural Mechanism Of Perceptual Anticipation In Table Tennis Players

Perceptual anticipation is a process of making predictions based on incomplete information.In our daily life,perceptual anticipation ability affects our effective interaction with others.While in the field of sports,perceptual anticipation ability is the key to get good grades.Excellent athletes are usually able to make an accurate judgment when they get a little bit of information,reacting ahead of time.A large number of studies have proved that long-term sports training contributes to expert advantage.It has been found that the action observation network(AON)plays a key role in anticipating the result of an observed action.The AON includes inferior frontal gyrus(IFG),inferior parietal lobule(IPL),middle occipital gyrus(MOG),superior temporal sulcus(STS),premotor cortex(PMC),etc.A large number of studies believe that motor experience will contribute to stronger activation of AON,but some scholars have proposed that the increase of motor experience does not necessarily lead to stronger activation of AON.There may also be a non-linear trend with experience.In addition,there are almost no researches on functional connectivity of athletes in task states at present,thus the functional connectivity of athletes in task states remains to be explored.Therefore,the purpose of this study are as follows:(1)to verify whether perceptual anticipation tasks can activate AON;(2)to explore whether sports experience can lead to stronger activation of AON;(3)to explore the differences in brain functional connections between athletes and ordinary people when performing perceptual anticipation tasks.In our study,we use the expert-novice paradigm,and design an event-related f MRI experiment based on this paradigm.The experiment recorded the behavioral data and magnetic resonance data of the subjects during the perceptual anticipation task.The analysis of f MRI data mainly includes three parts: whole brain activation analysis,ROI-based activation analysis and functional connectivity analysis.First of all,the whole brain activation analysis is to define the general cognitive brain regions in the perceptual anticipation task,verifying whether the experimental task will activate AON.The ROI-based analysis is based on the previous meta-analysis of the athletes’ observation anticipation task,relating to the AON.This analysis is order to further explore whether professional knowledge can lead to activation differences in major brain regions of AON,and explore the role of AON plays in perceptual expectation tasks.Finally,functional connectivity analysis is to explore whether motor experience can lead to adaptive changes in the function of AON.The results showed that the expert group and the novice group activated the middle occipital gyrus(MOG),middle temporal gyrus(MTG),and middle frontal gyrus(MFG)in the perceptual expectation task,and the expert group also activated the inferior parietal lobule(IPL).For the group effect analysis,the expert group showed stronger activation in the middle occipital gyrus(MOG),inferior parietal lobule(IPL),precentral gyrus(PCG),superior frontal gyrus(SFG),and middle frontal gyrus(MFG).Roi-based analysis showed that activation in the inferior frontal gyrus,superior temporal sulcus,and dorsal premotor cortex(d PMC)was significantly higher in the expert group than in the control group.In addition,functional connectivity analysis of ROI found that the expert group had more and generally stronger effective connections to nodes in AON than the novice group.The research results show that the AON is the neural basis of anticipation task,and exercise experience will lead to AON stronger activation,especially at the mirror-neuron system which contained the frontoparietal network.Long-term exercise experience makes athletes to store a lot of action representations,so their prediction involved the extraction and comparison of motor representations,which leading to stronger activation.Morever,stronger activation of the occipito-temporal brain region indicates an enhanced ability to integrate motor information of athletes.In addition,the results of functional connectivity analysis showed that the enhancement of effective connectivity,which indicated that athletes formed a specific activation mode during the perceptual anticipation task.Therefore,long-term sports training made the plastic changes occurred in athletes’ AON.