Investigation of the Roles and the Neural Mechanisms of Attentional and Motor Control in Sports Performance with Electroencephalography and Cognitive Tasks

Athletes usually predict the timing precisely when they respond to the stimuli apace in the games, and show their best performance. Our previous lines of work have investigated that motor preparation is critical for athletic performance (Wang, Wang, & Juan, 2016; Chang, Wang, Juan, 2014; Chang, Hsu, & Wang, 2018). Based on the findings, we suggested that tennis players might be less affected by temporal uncertainty, resulting in greater task performance. However, such superior ability might be mostly attributed to attentional allocation during target processing rather than motor preparation (Chang et al., 2018). Motor preparation processes revealed a close association between precise tempo-spatial motor control abilities and mental representation. Nevertheless, it is still in lack of comprehensive research probing the assessments of perception processes, responsible decisions, precise strength of the force and the status of neural activities concurrently. Therefore, the critical issue is to measure and predict the interactions of attention, working memory as well as motor control and sports performance simultaneously.Thus, the proposed research aims to investigate the influences of sports, which will include open-skill sport, closed-skill sport, and sedentary groups, on cognitive functions such as time perception, motor preparation, response inhibition, attentional control and working memory. Furthermore, the differences in sports performance reflected by those cognitive functions will also be explored. Our research group will be employing the precision cognitive neuroscientific equipment such as electroencephalography (EEG), pinch/grip force analyzer which is cooperated with the well-defined cognitive tasks and also applying the novel nonlinear dynamic data analytical method such as Holo-Hilbert Spectrum Analysis (HHSA; Huang et al., 2016; Nguyen et al., 2019a&b). The proposed work comprises two phases. The first phase focuses on the investigation of time perception as well as precise motor preparation. The second phase will be examing the role of motor control in specific sports. Through the investigation of the relations and underlying neural mechanisms of precise temporal preparation in sports and basic cognitive functions, the basic model of athletes’ potentials and performance speculation will be constructed systematically. Therefore, the findings, models, and theories derived from this study may provide suggestions to researchers, training committees, coaches, instructors and athletes for developing more ideal and precise sports training programs, the assessment of athletes’ performance and the improvement of sports capabilities.