The effect of visual and tactile information in motor preparation of climbing

ABSTRACT

In rock climbing, an appropriate motor preparation to a given climbing hold(s) is crucial for a fluent climbing. We investigated the influence of visual-tactile information in motor preparation of climbing, particularly the effect of the number of the holds and the tactile input of an actual hold was examined. Reaction times (RTs) under the priming paradigm were compared for climbers and non-climbers. Participants were asked to respond to a visual target (left or right arrow) after the presentation of a picture of a single climbing hold (Single-Prime condition: SP) or two holds (Double-Prime condition: DP). Before commencing each trial block, the participants were also asked to touch or watch an actual hold (touch /no-touch condition). The response based on the congruity between the orientation of the hold and that of the arrow was categorised as either congruent or incongruent. An ANOVA performed on the RTs showed the congruency effect, but this was observed only in the non-climbers. An additional analysis revealed a marginally significant climbing experience-related interaction. In the high-experienced climbers, the RTs in the touch condition were slower than those in the no-touch condition but this was only in the SP condition. In the no-touch condition, the RTs of DP were slower than those of SP. These results therefore suggest that the motor preparation is mediated by visual and tactile inputs of a given hold. The time needed for motor preparation, particularly in highly experienced climbers, may be modulated by the representational complexity of climbing movements through tactile information.

Highlight

• The number of the holds visually presented affected the motor preparation.

• The tactile input of the climbing hold modulated the motor preparation only in the highly experienced climbers.

• Our findings imply that climbing-specific context (i.e. combination of the given holds) and experience (i.e. action competency) are involved in the motor preparation of climbing.

KEYWORDS:

• rock climbing
• motor preparation
• vision
• tactile
• reaction times
• information processing

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank “BIG ROCK climbing gym” in Kanagawa for their help to recruit the participants. The authors would also like to thank Kuniyasu Imanaka and our laboratory colleagues for their helpful comments on this work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 We used months of climbing experience as an index of skill level because: (1) a time length of climbing experience is highly correlated with climbing grade (Whitaker et al., 2019); (2) the highest climbing grade for novice climbers can simply indicate the characteristics of physical aspects, such as arm strength, rather than perceptual aspects on which we focused.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.