Expertise sportive et entraînement perceptivo-cognitif de l’athlète
To perform at the top, athletes must possess a special perceptual-cognitive ability. This talent is the capacity to extract key information from a visual scene and is reflected by sportsmen’s vision and intelligence of play. For a long time, sport science has reported perceptual-cognitive expertise inside the domain-specific sport environment of athletes. But more recently, evidence has shown that expertise could also been reflected outside of this context, in daily activities for instance. Moreover, recent theories surrounding brain plasticity have driven researchers to develop new tools to train perceptual-cognitive skills of athletes in order to increase performance on the field. Those methods are mostly contextual to the athlete’s discipline. However, a new perceptual-cognitive training methodology, called 3-Dimensional Multiple Object Tracking (3D-MOT), which is deprived of sport context, has recently been developed and took a center part in our researches. One of the main objectives was to observe athletes’ specific and non-specific expertise during the same study. We evaluated biological motion perception in soccer players and non-athletes in a virtual reality environment. Sportsmen were systematically more efficient and faster compared to novices when discriminating the direction of the biological motion during a soccer specific exercise (shot) but also during a daily action (walk). The results suggest that athletes are better capable in perceiving human biological motions performed by others. Soccer activity seems to confer a fundamental advantage that goes beyond sport specific functions. Concurrent with those discoveries, we observed the amazing ability of an athlete’s performance to process dynamic and neutral visual scenes. Soccer players outperformed novices throughout the 3D-MOT test which consists in tracking moving targets and simulates perceptual-cognitive skills. Their visual tracking speed and their learning ability were superior. The results confirm previous data obtained by sport experts. The 3D-MOT is an attentional tracking paradigm that stimulates active processing of dynamic visual information. In particular, it targets selective, dynamic and sustained attention, as well as working memory. This tool can be used to train perceptual-cognitive functions of athletes. Soccer players trained with the 3D-MOT throughout 30 sessions have shown an increase in passing decision making (15%) on the field compared to control groups. For the first time, the results demonstrate a perceptual-cognitive transfer from the laboratory to the field following a non-contextual perceptual-cognitive training program. Our research helps to understand athletes’ expertise by using both specific and non-specific approaches and also present perceptual-cognitive training tools, in particular the 3D-MOT technique, to improve performance in sport.
Expertise 3D-MOT Perceptual-cognitive skills Athlete Biological motion Brain training Decision-making Virtual reality