Institute for Sport Science, University of Giessen Giessen, Germany.
Institute for Sport Science, University of Giessen Giessen, Germany ; Bender Institute of Neuroimaging, University of Giessen Giessen, Germany.
Front Hum Neurosci. 2014 Aug 1;8:568. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2014.00568. eCollection 2014.
In many daily activities, and especially in sport, it is necessary to predict the effects of others' actions in order to initiate appropriate responses. Recently, researchers have suggested that the action-observation network (AON) including the cerebellum plays an essential role during such anticipation, particularly in sport expert performers. In the present study, we examined the influence of task-specific expertise on the AON by investigating differences between two expert groups trained in different sports while anticipating action effects. Altogether, 15 tennis and 16 volleyball experts anticipated the direction of observed tennis and volleyball serves while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The expert group in each sport acted as novice controls in the other sport with which they had only little experience. When contrasting anticipation in both expertise conditions with the corresponding untrained sport, a stronger activation of AON areas (SPL, SMA), and particularly of cerebellar structures, was observed. Furthermore, the neural activation within the cerebellum and the SPL was linearly correlated with participant's anticipation performance, irrespective of the specific expertise. For the SPL, this relationship also holds when an expert performs a domain-specific anticipation task. Notably, the stronger activation of the cerebellum as well as of the SMA and the SPL in the expertise conditions suggests that experts rely on their more fine-tuned perceptual-motor representations that have improved during years of training when anticipating the effects of others' actions in their preferred sport. The association of activation within the SPL and the cerebellum with the task achievement suggests that these areas are the predominant brain sites involved in fast motor predictions. The SPL reflects the processing of domain-specific contextual information and the cerebellum the usage of a predictive internal model to solve the anticipation task.
在许多日常活动中，尤其是在运动中，人们需要预测他人的动作效果，以便做出适当的反应。最近，研究人员提出，包括小脑在内的动作观察网络（AON）在这种预期中起着至关重要的作用，特别是在运动专家中。在本研究中，我们通过研究在不同运动中接受训练的两个专家群体之间的差异，考察了任务特定专业知识对 AON 的影响，这些专家群体预测了观察到的网球和排球发球的方向，并进行了功能磁共振成像（fMRI）。每个运动的专家群体在其他运动中充当新手对照组，他们对该运动只有很少的经验。当将两个专业条件下的预期与相应的未训练运动进行对比时，发现 AON 区域（SPL、SMA），特别是小脑结构的激活更强。此外，小脑和 SPL 内的神经激活与参与者的预期表现呈线性相关，与具体专业知识无关。对于 SPL，当专家执行特定领域的预期任务时，这种关系仍然成立。值得注意的是，在专业条件下小脑以及 SMA 和 SPL 的更强激活表明，专家依赖于他们经过多年训练而精细调整的感知运动表现，以便在他们喜欢的运动中预测他人动作的效果。SPL 内激活与任务表现的关联表明，这些区域是快速运动预测中涉及的主要大脑部位。SPL 反映了特定领域上下文信息的处理，而小脑则使用预测性内部模型来解决预期任务。
