Journal
BRAIN STRUCTURE & FUNCTION
Volume 226, Issue 6, Pages 1973-1990Publisher
SPRINGER HEIDELBERG
DOI: 10.1007/s00429-021-02304-w
Keywords
Brain plasticity; Expert athletes; Functional flexibility; Functional MRI; Functional specialization; Visual-motor system
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Funding
- National Key Research and Development Program of China [2017YFC1310400]
- National Natural Science Foundation of China [31600869, 81471651, 11835003]
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Professional athletes show higher flexibility and specialization in the visual-motor system compared to non-athletes. The flexibility of the left putamen is positively correlated with skill level, and that of the left lingual gyrus is positively correlated with behavioral accuracy in an attention task.
Specialization and flexibility are two basic attributes of functional brain organization, enabling efficient cognition and behavior. However, it is largely unknown what plastic changes in specialization and flexibility in visual-motor areas occur in support of extraordinary motor skills in expert athletes and how the selective adaptability of the visual-motor system affects general perceptual or cognitive domains. Here, we used a dynamic network framework to investigate intrinsic functional specialization and flexibility of visual-motor system in expert table tennis players (TTP). Our results showed that sensorimotor areas increased intrinsic functional flexibility, whereas visual areas increased intrinsic functional specialization in expert TTP compared to nonathletes. Moreover, the flexibility of the left putamen was positively correlated with skill level, and that of the left lingual gyrus was positively correlated with behavioral accuracy of a sport-unrelated attention task. This study has uncovered dissociable plasticity of the visual-motor system and their predictions of individual differences in skill level and general attention processing. Furthermore, our time-resolved analytic approach is applicable across other professional athletes for understanding their brain plasticity and superior behavior.
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