Abstract

Pretrigger brain electrical slow wave shifts from frontal, centro-lateral (C3 andC4), and occipital areas as well as heart rate (HR), and respiration were recorded during shooting performance of three national-caliber marksmen and three unpractised adult subjects. Data from a period of 7.5 pretrigger seconds were averaged across about 300 shots per subject separately for two different testing sessions. The pretrigger HR decelerated peaking approximately at the release point. The typical respiration pattern consisted of breath holding with slow expiration preceding the trigger pull. A monotonically increasing negative shift was found between the active electrodes and the mastoid reference prior to the trigger pull. In the marksmens group the slow negative shift was frontally significantly larger in less successful shots compared to the superior shots. This can be interpreted to show the effect of the last oment elevation of the anticipatory arousal on the success of the shots: the increase of arousal preceding the shot resulted in less successful performance, whereas an intermediate elevation was manifested as superior performance. Verf.-Referat