Perceptual skills in badminton: fMRI indicates differences in brain activation between expert and novice players

Abstract

The purpose of the present study was to compare the brain activity of expert and novice badminton players while carrying out an anticipation task. In a block-design, fMRI study, five national badminton players, five club players and five novices viewed 2 s visual displays of an opposing player, and pressed a button to indicate which of four possible court positions a stroke was directed. Individual trials were occluded either 80 ms before or 80 ms after the racquet-shuttle contact. Different versions of the task used either full video, or point-light stimuli, which preserved the purely kinetic cues to the opponent’s action. Relative to viewing and responding to moving or stationary control stimuli, the anticipation task activated the brain’s mirror network (MNS), both in the full video and point-light versions. Activations overlapped strongly for the pre-contact and post-contact occlusion conditions, but the experts showed more widespread activation in the pre-contact condition where the only cues were from the opponent’s body movement, and novices in the post-contact condition in which the shuttle flight was visible. A second-level analysis of brain regions of interest showed greater activation in the MNS of expert brains (across all conditions) in the visual motion area MT/v5, and in BA45 and BA47 (inferior frontal gyrus). Also, in these areas and in the supplementary motor area (SMA) there was a significant interaction between expertise and level of occlusion, such that experts showed proportionally greater activation in the pre-contact occlusion condition. These higher activations imply that for experts, the pre-contact occlusion stimuli are strongly differentiated from control stimuli. This is consistent with MNS involvement in experts’ superior ability to analyse or model the kinetic information of an opponent’s body movement.