TY  - JOUR
A1  - Heppe, Holger
A1  - Zentgraf, Karen
T1  - Team handball experts outperform recreational athletes in hand and foot response inhibition : a behavioral study
T2  - Frontiers in psychology
N2  - Inhibition is a central component of human behavior. It enables flexible and adaptive behavior by suppressing prepotent motor responses. In former studies, it has been shown that sport athletes acting in dynamic environments exhibit superior motor inhibitory control based on sensory stimuli. So far, existing studies have corroborated this in manual motor response settings only. Therefore, this study addresses the effector specificity of the inhibition benefit in elite athletes compared to physically active controls. A sport-unspecific stop-signal task has been adapted for hand as well as feet usage and 30 elite handball players as well as 30 controls were tested. A repeated-measures ANOVA with the two factors “effector” (hands, feet) and “group” (expert, recreational athletes) was conducted. Our results suggest no group differences in two-choice response times, but a convincing superiority of handball players in inhibitory control (i.e., shorter stop-signal reaction times), predominantly when responding with their hands, with weaker differential effects when responding with their feet. This suggests that motor inhibition might be a comprehensive performance characteristic of sport athletes acting in dynamic environments, detectable predominantly in eye-hand coordination tasks.
KW  - response inhibition
KW  - effector specificity
KW  - motor expertise
KW  - handball
KW  - two-choice RT
KW  - motor inhibition
Y1  - 2019
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/51068
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-510683
SN  - 1664-1078
N1  - Copyright © 2019 Heppe and Zentgraf. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
VL  - 10
IS  - Art. 971
SP  - 1
EP  - 7
PB  - Frontiers Research Foundation
CY  - Lausanne
ER  -