1,721,104 research outputs found
Neural underpinnings of superior action prediction abilities in soccer players
No full textThe ability to form anticipatory representations of ongoing actions is crucial for effective interactions in dynamic environments. In sports, elite athletes exhibit greater ability than novices in predicting other players actions, mainly based on reading their body kinematics. This superior perceptual ability has been associated with a modulation of visual and motor areas by visual and motor expertise. Here, we investigated the causative role of visual and motor action representations in experts ability to predict the outcome of soccer actions. We asked expert soccer players (outfield players and goalkeepers) and novices to predict the direction of the ball after perceiving the initial phases of penalty kicks that contained or not incongruent body kinematics. During the task, we applied repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) over the superior temporal sulcus (STS) and the dorsal premotor cortex (PMd). Results showed that STS-rTMS disrupted performance in both experts and novices, especially in those with greater visual expertise (i.e. goalkeepers). Conversely, PMd-rTMS impaired performance only in expert players (i.e. outfield players and goalkeepers), who exhibit strong motor expertise into facing domain-specific actions in soccer games. These results provide causative evidence of the complimentary functional role of visual and motor action representations in experts action prediction
Chapter 2: The neural pathway of sport actions: from seeing and hearing to doing: perception-action relationships.
No full textThis chapter discusses a partial overview of the neuroscientific knowledge of sports performance. Our body is a beautiful machine able to receive different sources of information from the environment and to produce actions that in turn transform the environment. Traditionally, scientists from biomechanics, motor control and robotics were the specialists interested in understanding the body and its movements. One of the principal roles played by the connection between perceptual and motor functions is organizing actions in advance. The ventral pathway is involved when perception is simply for action recognition and has not a specific goal. A parallel neural network serves the perception of non-facial body parts. Representation of the human body is not only tied to sensori-motor information. Indeed, perceiving one's own and others' body heavily relies on visual information. One important implication for this hypothesized relationship between perception and action is that predictions can be made from an analysis of an action to define perception and vice versa
Associations of observer’s gender, Body Mass Index and internalization of societal beauty ideals to visual body processing
Full text linkWe examined whether visual processing mechanisms of the body of conspecifics are different in women and men and whether these rely on westernised socio-cultural ideals and body image concerns. Twenty-four women and 24 men performed a visual discrimination task of upright or inverted images of female or male bodies and faces (Experiment 1) and objects (Experiment 2). In Experiment 1, both groups of women and men showed comparable abilities in the discrimination of upright and inverted bodies and faces. However, the gender of the human stimuli yielded different effects on participants’ performance, so that female faces, and male bodies appeared to be processed less configurally than female bodies and male faces, respectively. Interestingly, the reduction of configural processing for male bodies was significantly predicted by participants’ Body Mass Index (BMI) and their level of internalization of muscularity. Our findings suggest that configural visual processing of bodies and faces in women and men may be linked to a selective attention to detail needed for discriminating salient physical (perhaps sexual) cues of conspecifics. Importantly, BMI and muscularity internalization of beauty ideals may also play a crucial role in this mechanism
Motion and Gender-Typing Features Interact in the Perception of Human Bodies
Full text linkThe human body conveys socially relevant information, including a person’s gender. Several studies have shown that both shape and motion inform gender judgments of bodies. However, while body shape seems to influence more the judgment of female bodies, body motion seems to play a major role in the judgments of male bodies. Yet, the interdependence of morphologic and dynamic cues in shaping gender judgment and attractiveness evaluation in body perception is still unclear. In two experiments, we investigated how variations of implied motion and shape interact in perceptual and affective judgments of female and male bodies. In Experiment 1, participants were asked to provide ratings for masculinity and femininity of virtual renderings of human bodies with variable gender-typing features and implied motion. We found evidence of a tendency to perceive bodies in static poses as more feminine and bodies in dynamic poses as more masculine. In Experiment 2, participants rated the same pictures for dynamism and pleasantness. We found that male bodies were judged more dynamic than female bodies with the same pose. Also, female bodies were liked more in static than in dynamic poses. A mediation analysis allowed us to further shed light on the relationship between gender-typing features and motion, suggesting that the less is the movement conveyed by a female body, the greater is an observer’s sensitivity to its femininity, and this leads to a more positive evaluation of its pleasantness. Our findings hint to an association between stillness and femininity in body perception, which can stem from either the evolutionary meaning of sexual selection and/or the influence of cultural norms
Do experts see it in slow motion? Altered timing of action simulation uncovers domain-specific perceptual processing in expert athletes
No full textAccurate encoding of the spatio-temporal properties of others’ actions is essential for the successful implementation of daily activities and, even more, for successful sportive performance, given its role in movement coordination and action anticipation. Here we investigated whether athletes are provided with special perceptual processing of spatio-temporal properties of familiar sportive actions. Basketball and volleyball players and novices were presented with short video-clips of free basketball throws that were partially occluded ahead of realization and were asked to judge whether a subsequently presented pose was either taken from the same throw depicted in the occluded video (action identification task) or temporally congruent with the expected course of the action during the occlusion period (explicit timing task). Results showed that basketball players outperformed the other groups in detecting action compatibility when the pose depicted earlier or synchronous, but not later phases of the movement as compared to the natural course of the action during occlusion. No difference was obtained for explicit estimations of timing compatibility. This leads us to argue that the timing of simulated actions in the experts might be slower than that of perceived actions (“slow-motion” bias), allowing for more detailed representation of ongoing actions and refined prediction abilities
Autistic traits predict poor integration between top-down contextual expectations and movement kinematics during action observation
Full text linkAutism is associated with difficulties in predicting and understanding other people's actions. There is evidence that autistic traits are distributed across a spectrum and that subclinical forms of autistic impairments can also be measured in the typical population. To investigate the association between autistic traits and motor responses to others' actions, we quantified these traits and measured cortico-spinal excitability modulations in M1 during the observation of actions embedded in congruent, incongruent and ambiguous contexts. In keeping with previous studies, we found that actions observed in congruent contexts elicited an early facilitation of M1 responses, and actions observed in incongruent contexts, resulted in a later inhibition. Correlational analysis revealed no association between autistic traits and the facilitation for congruent contexts. However, we found a significant correlation between motor inhibition and autistic traits, specifically related to social skills and attention to details. Importantly, the influence of these factors was independent from each other, and from the observer's gender. Thus, results suggest that individuals with higher social deficits and greater detail-processing style are more impaired in suppressing action simulation in M1 when a mismatch between kinematics and context occurs. This points to difficult integration between kinematics and contextual representations in the autistic-like brain
Predictive Action-perception Resonance and Mental Simulation (PARMS)
No full textMounting evidence suggests that even higher order socio-cognitive processes such as mind and intention reading, or action and perception understanding can be mapped onto modal sensorimotor cortices (1). The bodily instantiation of cognitive operations is called ‘embodiment’ and the internal reproduction of others’ mental, perceptuo-motor and emotional states is called ‘simulation’, a process which supposedly enables the interindividual sharing of experiences (2) and that may be linked to the striking functional property of the monkey premotor and parietal neurons (3, 4) activated during both action execution and observation (‘mirror neurons’). Behavioural and neural studies in healthy (5, 6) and brain damaged humans (7-9) indicate that action perception and execution rely upon largely overlapping neural substrates. Moreover, perceptuo-motor codes are tightly associated. Indeed, not only mere action observation strengthens the motor representation of the observed action (10), but also mere motor experience of a given action may improve its visual recognition (11). This inherent functional and anatomic bidirectional link may represent a deceivingly simple mechanism for the striking plastic abilities underlying social learning.
Also quintessential to effective social interactions is the ability to predict and anticipate the actions of other individuals. One crucial but thus far scarcely explored question concerns the role played by the different nodes of the action observation network (AON) in understanding others’ actions and intentions on the basis of predictive coding algorithms (12, 13). We have previously demonstrated that cortico-spinal motor systems are mainly activated when making predictions on upcoming actions (14, 15). Here we plan to expand previous knowledge by investigating: i) the circumstances that induce an observer to represent actions in the future. Single-pulse transcranial magnetic stimulation (spTMS) and fMRI will be used; ii) the causative role played by specific nodes of the AON network in the predictive coding of observed actions as well as of higher-order linguistic action representation. To this aim we will use a) rTMS in healthy subjects to create specific ‘virtual lesions’ and b) state-of-the-art lesion mapping techniques in brain damaged patients; iii) the plastic and dynamic aspects of predictive abilities by testing children while they will learn specific perceptuo-motor skills (e.g. soccer actions) and motorically-visually expert individuals (e.g. elite basketball athletes). Particular attention will be paid to error prediction by testing expert and non-expert healthy subjects and brain damaged patients in observation tasks requiring to make early choices on which action is going to be performed by a model and whether the observed action is performed correctly in time and space. fMRI, spTMS, and psychophysics studies will be carried out.
PARMS may have specific translational implications in different fields: i) robotics: our approach may be fundamentally important for applications aimed at reducing the comparative inability of current robotic systems to cope with the high prediction demands of real world social interactions and at increasing the competence of artificial agents to operate in natural, human-like environments and to produce meaningful behaviours by means of anticipatory simulation; ii) neurorehabilitation of motor deficits following stroke; iii) brain-based training procedures for optimizing sport performance and ultimately helping athletes to achieve excellenc
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