Watching an archery shot, the brain: Kim 2011

Twenty expert female archers and 21 women who had never shot watched short videos of an expert archer shooting in the Western style, inside a functional MRI scanner. The archers (mean age 28.9, 15.1 years of archery) belonged to the Korean university archery association and five were on the national team; the non-archers were 26.8 on average. The two groups were similar in age and education.

In both groups, watching the shot activated the premotor cortex, the medial prefrontal cortex, the superior and inferior parietal cortices and the cerebellum. In the archers the activation was wider: in the direct comparison the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, the inferior parietal cortex, the superior and inferior prefrontal cortices, the premotor cortex, the anterior and posterior cingulate (extending into the retrosplenial cortex), the superior temporal sulcus, the caudate and the parahippocampal gyrus were more active. No area was more active in the non-archers.

The authors read the result in three ways. The premotor and inferior parietal cortices belong to the so-called mirror neuron system, which is thought to respond more when the observed movement is part of the observer's own motor repertoire. The dorsomedial prefrontal cortex is linked to representing other people's mental states. The cingulate, retrosplenial and parahippocampal areas are linked to retrieving familiar memories.

The videos showed the posture of an expert archer, a man, during the shot, with his face blurred so that attention went to the body's movement rather than the expression. There were six 9-second clips, alternating with a black screen as the control condition, in 18-second blocks repeated three times, in random order and shown through fibre-optic goggles. Participants only had to watch.

The scanner was a 3 tesla GE unit with an eight-channel head coil, with 31 slices of 4 millimetres and one acquisition every 3 seconds. The images were analysed in SPM2 with a random effects model; the maps within each group use a threshold of p < 0.01 and the comparison between groups a threshold of p < 0.05, both corrected for multiple comparisons over the entire brain using the FDR method. For safety reasons the non-archers were not asked to shoot, so there is no score for them.

The control condition is a black screen, not a video of a different movement. The difference between the groups could therefore come partly from general interest, or from familiarity with the archery setting, and not only from simulating the movement in the observer's own motor system. The authors argue for motor familiarity because the fusiform gyrus, linked to visual familiarity, was not more active in the archers: a reasonable argument, but still an inference.

There was no task during viewing and no measure of attention, understanding or judgement of the shot, and nothing links the results to the archers' scores: it is not known whether those with wider activation shoot better. The comparison is between experts and people who have never shot, so it does not separate levels of experience. The sample is female and Korean only, and there is a single archer in the videos, a man. In the text, the summary of the between-group results does not mention the premotor cortex, although it appears in the table and the discussion.

The study shows that an expert archer, watching another archer shoot, engages motor and memory areas more than someone who has never shot: in a sense she watches with her own repertoire. Many coaches use video of strong archers as a reference, and this finding describes, at least in part, what happens in the viewer's brain.

It does not say, however, that watching video improves shooting, or by how much, or for whom: none of this was measured. And comparing with people who have never held a bow does not show how the response changes on the way from beginner to expert. For anyone who shoots it is background, not a training indication.