Table Tennis Experts Outperform Novices in a Demanding Cognitive-Motor Dual-Task Situation

Abstract

Theories on motor skill acquisition predict that earlier learning stages require more attention, which should lead to higher cognitive-motor dual-task interference in novices as compared to experts. Expert and novice table tennis players returned balls from a ball machine while concurrently performing an auditory 3-back task (working memory). The groups did not differ in 3-back performance in the single task. Cognitive dual-task performance reductions were more pronounced in novices. A similar pattern emerged for the number of missed balls in table tennis, except that experts outperformed novices already in the single task. Experts consistently showed costs of about 10%, while novices showed costs between 30% and 50%. The findings indicate that performances of novices suffer considerably in motor-cognitive dual-task situations.

Keywords:

• Expertise
• dual-tasking
• cognition
• motor skill learning

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Luca Scornaienchi for his help with data collection, Gianluca Amico, Daniel Bill, and Janine Vieweg for helpful discussions, and Adam Beavan for proofreading. They also thank two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Saarland University.