Exploring the Brain Activity Related to Missing Penalty Kicks: An fNIRS Study

At vital moments in professional soccer matches, penalties were often missed. Psychological factors, such as anxiety and pressure, are among the critical causes of the mistakes, commonly known aschoking under pressure. Nevertheless, the factors have not been fully explored. In this study, we used functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to investigate the influence of the brain on this process. Anin-situstudy was set-up (N= 22), in which each participant took 15 penalties under three different pressure conditions: without a goalkeeper, with an amiable goalkeeper, and with a competitive goalkeeper. Both experienced and inexperienced soccer players were recruited, and the brain activation was compared across groups. Besides, fNIRS activation was compared between sessions that participants felt anxious against sessions without anxiety report, and between penalty-scoring and -missing sessions. The results show that the task-relevant brain region, the motor cortex, was more activated when players were not experiencing performance anxiety. The activation of task-irrelevant areas was shown to be related to players experiencing anxiety and missing penalties, especially the prefrontal cortex (PFC). More particularly, an overall higher activation of the PFC and an increase of PFC lateral asymmetry were related to anxious players and missed penalties, which can be caused by players' worries about the consequences of scoring or missing the penalty kicks. When experienced players were feeling anxious, their left temporal cortex activation increased, which could be an indication that experienced overthink the situation and neglect their automated skills. Besides, the left temporal cortex activation is higher when inexperienced players succeeded to score a penalty. Overall, the results of this study are in line with the neural efficiency theory and demonstrate the feasibility and ecological validity to detect neurological clues relevant to anxiety and performance from fNIRS recordingsin the field.</jats:p

On the Use of Multi-sensory Cues in Symmetric and Asymmetric Shared Collaborative Virtual Spaces

Physical face-to-face collaboration with someone gives a higher-quality experience compared to mediated communication options, such as a phone- or video-based chat. Participants can share rich sensory cues to multiple human senses in a physical space. Also, the perceptual sensing of the surrounding environment including other peoples' reactions can influence human communication and emotion, and thus collaborative performance. Shared spaces in virtual environments provide degraded sensory experiences because most commercial virtual reality systems typically provide only visual and audio feedback. The impact of richer, multi-sensory feedback on joint decision-making tasks in VR is still an open area of research. Two independent studies exploring this topic are presented in this paper. We implemented a multi-sensory system that delivers vision, audio, tactile, and smell feedback, and we compared the system to a typical VR system. The scenario placed two users in a virtual theme-park safari ride with a number of non-player character (NPC) passengers to simulate realistic scenarios compared to the real-world and we varied the type and complexity of NPCs reactions to participants. In Experiment 1, we provided both users with either multi-sensory or typical sensory feedback symmetrically as a between-subjects factor, and used NPC reaction type as a within-subjects factor. In Experiment 2, we provided sensory feedback asymmetrically to each user (i.e., one had multi-sensory cues and the other had typical sensory cues) as a between-subjects factor, and used NPC reaction type as a within-subjects factor. We found that the number of sensory channels and NPC reactions did not influence user perception significantly under either symmetric or asymmetric sensory feedback conditions. However, after accounting for individual personality traits (e.g., assertive, passive), as well as any existing relationship between the pairs, we found that increasing the number of sensory channels can significantly improve subjective responses.</jats:p