Differences between real and virtual tasks among young badminton athletes – an interdisciplinary approach for neurosciences and sports

A high-level of action anticipation is crucially for different performances in sports, such as in badminton. This work aiming tocompare the accuracy and reaction time of young competitive players in the training in real and virtual badminton tasks. Thirty-eightbadminton players were divided in three different groups depending on their experience in badminton championships (group 1 had the most and group 3 the least experience) and evaluated on two different tasks, one real and the other virtual. Groups 1 and 2 had better reaction time in the real execution test, but they committed more anticipation errors. For virtual-task, group 3 had significantly morecontralateral errors. In conclusion, this suggests that the more-experienced players “read” opponents’ body movements better and respond properly to the outcomes. By using snapshots of opponent’s stroke as cues, the anticipation did not differ between groups depending on player experience in virtual-task. Our results might increase the knowledge for badminton training, but furthermore, this data might be useful in using sport tasks in order to understand and research on motor learning and anticipation.