Schedule of Events | Symposia

"Action Understanding and Mu Suppression Between Athletes and Non-Athletes"

Poster Session F - Tuesday, April 1, 2025, 8:00 – 10:00 am EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Nathan Vandegrift¹ (nathansv@usca.edu), Lucille Burns¹, Vincent Bush¹, Laura Jelsone-Swain¹; ¹University of South Carolina-Aiken

Action understanding is the ability to predict and interpret other individuals’ actions and understand the action's intentions, goals, and plans. Action understanding is a key concept to theory of mind, which is the cognitive ability to recognize the mental states, beliefs, desires, and wants of others that differ from the self. Athletes participate in extensive observation and prediction of actions during competition and practice, which may suggest an advantage in action understanding. This may also manifest in neural activity differences, specifically enhanced mu suppression over somatosensory regions during observation of motor actions. To test this, we recruited athletes and non-athletes based on standardized criteria to compare understanding of actions and mu power using EEG. Using a fast Fourier transform, mu power suppression between 8 - 12 hz was examined over electrodes Cz, C3, and C4. No significant differences were found between athletes and non-athletes for mu power suppression. Similarly, no differences in accuracy or reaction time were found for identification of actions. Weekly exercise levels were included as a covariate in these models to control for level of physical activity between groups, which did significantly relate to the accuracy of action understanding. There was also a medium effect size between exercise and midline mu suppression at Cz, albeit not statistically significant. Collectively, athlete status may not play a specific role in neuroplastic differences related to action understanding compared to non-athletes. Rather, it appears exercise more generally is involved, which suggests that exercise may support social interactions related to theory-of-mind.

Topic Area: PERCEPTION & ACTION: Multisensory