An ERP Study on the Specificity of Taekwondo Athletes to Threatening Information Processing

Abstract

In the current study, event-related potential (ERP) technology is used to investigate the P1 and N1 components in the early processing stage and P3 component in the late processing stage of taekwondo athletes with threatening pictures in real competition situations as stimulus materials. The results present two findings: 1) In the early processing stage, compared with general threats, special threats induced a larger P1 amplitude and a longer N1 latency, and show significant expert advantages in P1 components; and 2) In the late processing stage, the special threat induced a larger P3 amplitude than the general threat, and the P3 amplitude induced by the expert group was significantly larger than that of the novice group under the special threat condition, indicating that taekwondo athletes had class specificity in the processing of threatening information, that is, specific threats had processing advantages over general threats, and there were early and late differences in the processing of specific threatening information.