Greco-Roman Wrestling on the World Stage: Performance Trends and Country Comparisons

Abstract Background. The Olympic Games represent the greatest sporting event, uniting athletes from around the world in the spirit of competition, achievement, and unity. The 2023 World Championship serves as the primary qualifier for the 2024 Olympic Games, providing critical data on the technical and strategic performance of elite wrestlers. Problem. The Study Aim is to identify key aspects of the best-ranked teams at the 2023 Greco-Roman Wrestling World Championship and to conduct a comparative analysis. Methods. This study analyzed 271 matches involving 86 wrestlers from 10 countries using the Performance Data Analysis platform by United World Wrestling. Key performance indicators such as match duration, number of actions in standing and parterre positions, and success indices were calculated. Results. Performance indicators revealed preferences for standing and parterre positions, with teams like Cuba and France scoring highest on the Most Successful Wrestler Index at 2.69 and 1.92, respectively. Notably, actions like gut wrench, step out, lifts, and take down represented over 70% of all actions. Statistical analysis confirmed significant differences in parterre actions among wrestlers from Azerbaijan, Turkey, Georgia, and Armenia. Conclusions. The study underscores the complexity of tactical preferences that influence team performance at world championships. The findings underscore the pivotal role of advanced analytics in enhancing understanding and strategic planning in competitive wrestling. The success index metrics, while associated with teams’ rankings and Olympic qualification, do not fully capture the extent of their achievements

Perceptual expertise improves category detection in natural scenes

There is much debate about how detection, categorization, and within-category identification relate to one another during object recognition. Whether these tasks rely on partially shared perceptual mechanisms may be determined by testing whether training on one of these tasks facilitates performance on another. In the present study we asked whether expertise in discriminating objects improves the detection of these objects in naturalistic scenes. Self-proclaimed car experts (N = 34) performed a car discrimination task to establish their level of expertise, followed by a visual search task where they were asked to detect cars and people in hundreds of photographs of natural scenes. Results revealed that expertise in discriminating cars was strongly correlated with car detection accuracy. This effect was specific to objects of expertise, as there was no influence of car expertise on person detection. These results indicate a close link between object discrimination and object detection performance, which we interpret as reflecting partially shared perceptual mechanisms and neural representations underlying these tasks: the increased sensitivity of the visual system for objects of expertise – as a result of extensive discrimination training – may benefit both the discrimination and the detection of these objects. Alternative interpretations are also discussed

Current directions in visual working memory research: An introduction and emerging insights

Visual working memory (VWM) is a core construct in the cognitive (neuro-)sciences, assumed to serve as a hub for information exchange and thus supporting a multitude of cognitive functions related to processing visual information. Here, we give an introduction into key terms and paradigms and an overview of ongoing debates in the field, to which the articles collected in this Special Issue on 'Current Directions in Visual Working Memory Research' contribute. Our aim is to extract, from this overview, some 'emerging' theoretical insights concerning questions such as the optimal way to examine VWM, which types of mental representations contribute to performance on VWM tasks, and how VWM keeps features from the same object together and apart from features of concurrently maintained objects (the binding problem)

Communication Biophysics

Contains reports on six research projects.National Institutes of Health (Grant 5 PO1 NS13126)National Institutes of Health (Grant 5 RO1 NS18682)National Institutes of Health (Grant 5 RO1 NS20322)National Institutes of Health (Grant 5 R01 NS20269)National Institutes of Health (Grant 5 T32NS 07047)Symbion, Inc.National Science Foundation (Grant BNS 83-19874)National Science Foundation (Grant BNS 83-19887)National Institutes of Health (Grant 6 RO1 NS 12846)National Institutes of Health (Grant 1 RO1 NS 21322

Differences in manifestation of sensory-motor reactions and specific perceptions at the men and women doing martial arts

Abstract. Purpose: to establish features of manifestation of sensory-motor reactions and specific perceptions at the men and women doing martial arts. Material and methods: analysis of scientific-methodical information, generalization of the best practical experience, psycho-physiological methods of the research, methods of mathematical statistics. 46 sportsmen, who are engaged in different types of combat sports, participated in the research. Participants were divided into two groups: 1 – 27 men, median age (19,41±1,75) years; 2 – 19 women, median age (19,69±1,90) years, reliable differences on age, (p>0,05). Sportsmen had qualification Candidate Master of Sports and Master of Sports. Results: assessment of simple, difficult sensory-motor reactions and specific perceptions of martial artists is executed. The most significant qualities for success of men and women in martial arts allowed distinguishing the analysis of results of the held psycho-physiological testing. In the course of the research it was defined that the best indicators of simple sensory-motor reactions are observed at female martial artists (from 1 % till 2 %), and at male martial artists results in difficult sensory-motor reactions (from 2 % till 11 %) and specific perceptions are higher (from 1 % till 19 %). It is defined that pedagogical features of the organization of educational-training process of martial artists of various sexes is rational planning of loads and volume of trainings, structures of the competitive period, account and use of means of recovery of the lost working capacity. Conclusions: it is established that abilities to analyze, estimate and predict situations quickly and in due time to make the correct decisions during a single combat, that is explained unreliable distinctions (p>0,05) in psycho-physiological indicators of the studied sportsmen are formed at men and women who are engaged in different types of martial arts.Keywords: martial arts, men, women, indicators, sensory-motor reactions, specific perceptions

The cost of facing fear : visual working memory is impaired for faces expressing fear

Previous research has identified numerous factors affecting the capacity and accuracy of visual working memory (VWM). One potentially important factor is the emotionality of the stimuli to be encoded and held in VWM. We often must hold in VWM information that is emotionally charged, but much is still unknown about how the emotionality of stimuli impacts VWM performance. In the current research, we performed four studies examining the impact of fearful facial expressions on VWM for faces. Fearful expressions were found to produce a consistent cost to VWM performance. This cost was modulated by encoding time, but not set size. This cost was only present for faces in an upright orientation consistent with this cost being a product of the emotionality of the faces rather than lower-level perceptual differences between neutral and fearful faces. These findings are discussed in the context of existing theoretical accounts of the impact of emotion on information processing. We suggest that a number of competing effects drive both costs and benefits and are at play when emotional information must be stored in VWM, with the task context determining the balance between them