N. S. Yen

Contributions of Perceptual and Motor Experience of an observed action to anticipating its result.

To gain deeper insight into respective contributions of perceptual and motor experience of an observed action to anticipating its result, we examined the perceptual anticipation of players with different action roles in striking sports. Baseball pitchers and batters at both advanced and intermediate levels were asked to make a decision about whether to swing the bat when viewing a series of videos showing incomplete sequences of a model pitcher throwing a strike or a ball. The results revealed that first 100 ms of ball flight could discriminate advanced batters from intermediate pitchers and batters (with no difference between intermediate pitchers and batters). Particularly, advanced batters (perceptual experts with regard to pitching action) were statistically more accurate and less uncertain in making decisions than were intermediate players, whereas advanced pitchers (motor experts) only showed this tendency without reaching a statistically significant level. Moreover, advanced batters demonstrated greater perceptual sensitivity in discriminating when to swing at strikes over balls than all other players. Our findings suggested that when players were above intermediate level, perceptual experience of an observed action facilitated the perceptual anticipation to a greater extent than motor experience of producing it.

Nonlinear neuroplasticity corresponding to sports experience: A voxel‐based morphometry and resting‐state functional connectivity study

We aimed to investigate the structural neuroplasticity associated with different levels of sports experience and its effect on the corresponding resting‐state functional circuitry. We recruited 18 skilled baseball batters (SB), 19 intermediate baseball batters (IB), and 17 healthy controls (HC), and used magnetic resonance imaging methods to compare their regional gray‐matter volume (GMV) and seed‐based resting‐state functional connectivity (rsFC). Our results revealed that a quadratic function could better depict intergroup differences in regional GMV than a linear function. In particular, the IB showed lower or higher regional GMV than the other two groups. The difference in GMV in the supplementary motor area and areas belonging to the ventral stream, including the middle temporal gyrus and middle temporal pole, might be possibly related to baseball‐specific motor and perceptual experience, such as inhibitory action control and pitch identification. On the other hand, the stronger rsFC seeded from the right middle temporal pole to the default mode network, particularly in the precuneus, in the SB and IB relative to that in the HC might be possibly associated with the theory of mind, such as deciding whether to swing or not against the pitcher by detecting the spatial information of pitches. In conclusion, our three‐group design enabled the capture of the unique and transient changes that occur during the intermediate phase of expertise development. Our findings indicated that structural and functional brain changes do not necessarily linearly increase as a function of experience as previously suggested by the literature.