"Where will he shoot?" An experimental paradigm for the investigation of the intentions recognition of the soccer player in penalty kick

Journal title RICERCHE DI PSICOLOGIA
Author/s Alice Cancer, Federica Lodato, Mauro Bonali, Lina Stefanini, Daniele Tolomini, Leonardo Fogassi, Alessandro Antonietti
Publishing Year 2022 Issue 2021/4 Language Italian
Pages 21 P. 1-21 File size 0 KB
DOI 10.3280/rip2021oa12896
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A novel experimental paradigm was designed to test the hypothesis that the mirror neuron system is involved in the anticipation of a motor action outcome, namely, the ball trajectory in the penalty kick (PK). A series of videos showing PKs, performed by professional soccer players and videotaped from the goalkeeper’s point of view, were edited so that the video would stop as the player’s foot touched the ball. The hypothesis was that the characteristics of the player’s movements during the PK preparation would provide cues about the ball trajectory and that the correct anticipation of the ball direction would be more likely in individuals with a high level of soccer expertise, due to the activation of the motor representations of the PK shooting movements. Speed and accuracy performances in the PK task of 20 right-handed university students were recorded and relationships between such scores with mental rotation ability, simple reaction times, level of soccer expertise, familiarity, and interest in soccer matches were investigated. Results showed that response accuracy in the direction-identification task was significantly higher than random. Moreover, the soccer experience modulated the response speed in the experimental task: The most expert participants were slower to react.

Keywords: ; soccer; penalty kick; mirror neurons; sport psychology; individual differences; mental imagery

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