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The Effect of Sport Practice on Enhanced Cognitive Processing of Bodily Indices: A Study on Volleyball Players and Their Ability to Predict Hand Gestures

Author

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  • Giovanni Ottoboni

    (Department of Psychology, University of Bologna, 40127 Bologna, Italy)

  • Roberto Nicoletti

    (Department of Philosophy and Communication Studies, University of Bologna, 40122 Bologna, Italy)

  • Alessia Tessari

    (Department of Psychology, University of Bologna, 40127 Bologna, Italy)

Abstract

To program proper reactions, athletes must anticipate opponents’ actions on the basis of previous visuomotor experience. In particular, such abilities seem to rely on processing others’ intentions to act. We adopted a new approach based on an attentional spatial compatibility paradigm to investigate how elite volleyball players elaborate both spatial and motor information at upper-limb posture presentation. Forty-two participants (18 volleyball players and 17 nonathlete controls assigned to Experiments 1 a and b, and eight basketball players assigned to Experiment 2) were tested to study their ability to process the intentions to act conveyed by hands and extract motor primitives (i.e., significant components of body movements). Analysis looked for a spatial compatibility effect between direction of the spike action (correspondence factor) and response side for both palm and back of the hand (view factor). We demonstrated that volleyball players encoded spatial sport-related indices from bodily information and showed preparatory motor activation according to the direction of the implied spike actions for the palm view (Experiment 1; hand simulating a cross-court spike, p = 0.013, and a down-the-line spike, p = 0.026) but both nonathlete controls (Experiment 1; both p < 0.05) and other sports athletes (basketball players, Experiment 2; p = 0.34, only cross-court spike) did not. Results confirm that elite players’ supremacy lies in the predictive abilities of coding elementary motor primitives for their sport discipline.

Suggested Citation

  • Giovanni Ottoboni & Roberto Nicoletti & Alessia Tessari, 2021. "The Effect of Sport Practice on Enhanced Cognitive Processing of Bodily Indices: A Study on Volleyball Players and Their Ability to Predict Hand Gestures," IJERPH, MDPI, vol. 18(10), pages 1-14, May.
    • Handle: RePEc:gam:jijerp:v:18:y:2021:i:10:p:5384-:d:557091
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    1. Manuel Conejero Suárez & Antonio Luiz Prado Serenini & Carmen Fernández-Echeverría & Daniel Collado-Mateo & M. Perla Moreno Arroyo, 2020. "The Effect of Decision Training, from a Cognitive Perspective, on Decision-Making in Volleyball: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis," IJERPH, MDPI, vol. 17(10), pages 1-14, May.
    2. Renata Alvares Denardi & Fabian Alberto Romero Clavijo & Thiago Augusto Costa de Oliveira & Bruno Travassos & Go Tani & Umberto Cesar Corrêa, 2017. "The volleyball setter’s decision-making on attacking," International Journal of Performance Analysis in Sport, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 17(4), pages 442-457, July.
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    Cited by:

    1. Giovanni Ottoboni & Andrea Ceciliani & Alessia Tessari, 2021. "The Effect of Structured Exercise on Short-Term Memory Subsystems: New Insight on Training Activities," IJERPH, MDPI, vol. 18(14), pages 1-10, July.

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