Citation

Romeas T, Faubert J. Front. Psychol. 2015; 6: 1343.

Affiliation

Visual Psychophysics and Perception Laboratory, School of Optometry, Université de Montréal, Montreal QC, Canada.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2015, Frontiers Research Foundation)

DOI

10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01343

PMID

26388828

PMCID

PMC4558464

Abstract

Recent studies have shown that athletes' domain specific perceptual-cognitive expertise can transfer to everyday tasks. Here we assessed the perceptual-cognitive expertise of athletes and non-athletes using sport specific and non-sport specific biological motion perception (BMP) tasks. Using a virtual environment, university-level soccer players and university students' non-athletes were asked to perceive the direction of a point-light walker and to predict the trajectory of a masked-ball during a point-light soccer kick. Angles of presentation were varied for orientation (upright, inverted) and distance (2 m, 4 m, 16 m). Accuracy and reaction time were measured to assess observers' performance. The results highlighted athletes' superior ability compared to non-athletes to accurately predict the trajectory of a masked soccer ball presented at 2 m (reaction time), 4 m (accuracy and reaction time), and 16 m (accuracy) of distance. More interestingly, experts also displayed greater performance compared to non-athletes throughout the more fundamental and general point-light walker direction task presented at 2 m (reaction time), 4 m (accuracy and reaction time), and 16 m (reaction time) of distance. In addition, athletes showed a better performance throughout inverted conditions in the walker (reaction time) and soccer kick (accuracy and reaction time) tasks. This implies that during human BMP, athletes demonstrate an advantage for recognizing body kinematics that goes beyond sport specific actions.

Language: en

Keywords

discrimination task; perceptual-cognitive expertise; point-light soccer; point-light walker; skill transfer; sport performance