No evidence for top-down expertise effects on action perception in sprinters using static images

Athletes have been found to demonstrate a superior ability to detect subtle variations in dynamic displays (e.g., point-light displays and videos) depicting expert actions compared to non-athletes. The current study aimed to determine whether this advantage also exists when dynamic information is unavailable (i.e., using static images). Using a staircase procedure, two frames from a video depicting an athlete either walking (everyday action) or performing a sprint start (expert action) were presented, and athletes (sprinters) and non-athletes were asked to indicate whether the images were identical or different. We examined whether presenting the images sequentially (temporal task) or simultaneously (spatial task) influenced participants' discrimination performance. We predicted that the sprinters would outperform the non-sprinters in the spatial task as body postures could be compared directly but not in the temporal task due to larger representational momentum effects for athletes. Contrary to our hypotheses, the sprinters and non-sprinters performed similarly in all tasks and conditions. In line with the prediction that representational momentum may impair performance, participants’ thresholds were lower for the spatial than the temporal task. However, post-hoc analysis suggested that this effect is likely to be better explained by a task order effect whereby participants who completed the temporal task first exhibited an advantage in the spatial task, while there were no performance differences for participants who completed the opposite task order. In sum, our results provide no evidence for the idea that motor expertise affects action perception (i.e., perceptual resonance) in a simple psychophysical task employing static images.