Timing of movement-related decision processes in clay-pigeon shooters as assessed by event-related brain potentials and reaction times

Abstract The present study attempts to shed some light on the temporal aspects of Information Processing (IP) in clay-pigeon shooters and to confirm the existence of an attentional "style" strictly bound to the practice of the two specialties of this sport: skeet and trap. Eight olympic athletes were subjected to an experimental psychophysiological paradigm in which the latency of the N2 and P300 components of Event-related Potentials and RT were recorded during an auditory discrimination task with two different levels of difficulty. The results suggest that the motor performance of these athletes is subserved by a different timing of the processing mechanisms. It is proposed that this might be due to the adoption of two different modes of I.P. to cope with the experimental conditions. More in detail, a strategy primarily based on "knowledge" might explain the performance decrease of the skeet shooters in the difficult task in comparison with the easy task. Conversely, the great stability shown in the two difficulty levels of the task by the trap shooters may be sustained by a primarily "data-driven" processing strategy.