Skilled performers show right parietal lateralization during
anticipation of beach volleyball attacks
Abstract
The way in which biological motion is processed, globally or locally,
may depend upon the observer’s perceptual skill or experience with the
stimulus. Skilled athletes with extensive perceptual experience
observing sport-specific movements use globally distributed motion
information across an opponent’s body to anticipate actions, while less
skilled athletes focus on single-reliable kinematic cues. Published
reports have demonstrated that attention can be primed globally or
locally before perceptual tasks, and such an intervention could
highlight motion processing mechanisms used by skilled and less skilled
observers. In this study, we investigate skill-differences in biological
motion processing using attentional priming. Skilled (N = 16) and less
skilled (N = 16) players anticipated temporally occluded videos of beach
volleyball attacks while being primed using a Navon matching task. EEG
at parietal regions was measured to index global or local attention.
Skilled players were more accurate than less skilled players across
occlusion intervals and priming conditions. Global priming resulted in
better performance for both skill groups. Skilled players showed
significantly reduced alpha and beta power in the right compared to left
parietal region, but brain activity was not affected by priming
interventions. Our findings highlight the importance of right parietal
dominance for skilled performers, which may be functional for inhibiting
left hemispheric local processing or enhancing visual spatial attention
for dynamic visual scenes. Further work is needed to systematically
determine the function of this pattern of brain activity during skilled
anticipation in other contexts.