Background. Tai chi is recognized worldwide for its rehabilitation abilities and healthcare benefits. However, in recent years, some movements associated with tai chi have been shown to damage the lower limb joints. The purpose of this study was to investigate and compare the effects of different movements, postures, center of mass (COM) movements, and range of knee movement of tai chi exercises on knee joint load. Methods. Fourteen professional tai chi practitioners in two postures (high and low) were enrolled to perform the following four typical tai chi movements: wild horse’s mane (WHM), repulse monkey (RM), wave-hand in cloud (WHIC), and grasp the bird’s tail (GBT). Kinematic and kinetics data were synchronously collected using the Vicon infrared high-speed motion capture system and a three-dimensional (3D) force measurement platform. Variance analysis and partial correlation analysis were performed to investigate factors influencing peak knee joint moment and vertical ground reaction force (VGRF). Results. The results showed that the peak knee extension and abduction moment were larger in WHM and RM than those in WHIC and GBT ( ). WHM was associated with greater rotation moment than the other typical movements ( ). VGRF and joint moment among different poses were significantly different. Low-pose tai chi typical movements were associated with greater VGRF, knee joint extension and abduction, and rotation moments than high-pose movements ( ). The anteroposterior and mediolateral COM displacements were strongly and positively associated with VGRF ( ), while the mediolateral COM displacement was negatively associated with knee extension moment ( ). The knee internal-external rotation ROM and anteroposterior and mediolateral COM displacements were positively associated with knee abduction moment ( ). Conclusion. For long-term tai chi exercises, choosing a suitable posture based on an individual exercise level and reasonable control of knee ROM and COM displacement can reduce the risk of knee injury during exercise.

Both tai chi and walking can improve the physical health of the elderly, but the effect on the emotional cognitive function of the elderly is unclear. To investigate the effect of long-term walking and tai chi exercise on the emotional cognitive function of the elderly, 63 subjects were recruited in this study according to age and exercise habits, including 16 in the youth control group, 15 in the elderly non-exercise control group, 17 in the elderly walking group, and 18 in the elderly tai chi group. The “learning–test paradigm” of emotional faces was used to measure the subjects’ ability to recognize and remember emotional (negative and neutral) faces. Behavioral and EEG data were recorded during the learning and testing phases. The results showed that there is aging in emotional cognition in older adults compared with younger adults. Long-term walking and tai chi exercise can delay the deterioration of emotional cognitive function in older adults to some extent. Both walking and tai chi exercise can delay the decline in aging-related emotional face recognition function to some extent. Walking exercise can delay the decline in aging-related emotional face memory function to some extent.

Attentional blink (AB) is a phenomenon in which the perception of a second target is impaired when it appears within 200–500 ms after the first target. Sound affects an AB and is accompanied by the appearance of an asymmetry during audiovisual integration, but it is not known whether this is related to the tonal representation of sound. The aim of the present study was to investigate the effect of audiovisual asymmetry on attentional blink and whether the presentation of pitch improves the ability to detect a target during an AB that is accompanied by audiovisual asymmetry. The results showed that as the lag increased, the subject’s target recognition improved and the pitch produced further improvements. These improvements exhibited a significant asymmetry across the audiovisual channel. Our findings could contribute to better utilizations of audiovisual integration resources to improve attentional transients and auditory recognition decline, which could be useful in areas such as driving and education.

In the rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) paradigm, sound affects participants’ recognition of targets. Although many studies have shown that sound improves cross-modal processing, researchers have not yet explored the effects of sound semantic information with respect to different locations and processing modalities after removing sound saliency. In this study, the RSVP paradigm was used to investigate the difference between attention under conditions of consistent and inconsistent semantics with the target (Experiment 1), as well as the difference between top-down (Experiment 2) and bottom-up processing (Experiment 3) for sounds with consistent semantics with target 2 (T2) at different sequence locations after removing sound saliency. The results showed that cross-modal processing significantly improved attentional blink (AB). The early or lagged appearance of sounds consistent with T2 did not affect participants’ judgments in the exogenous attentional modality. However, visual target judgments were improved with endogenous attention. The sequential location of sounds consistent with T2 influenced the judgment of auditory and visual congruency. The results illustrate the effects of sound semantic information in different locations and processing modalities.

Anticipation is central to perceptual–cognitive expertise in badminton, but the decision mechanisms through which experts use visual and auditory cues remain unclear. This study examined expert–novice differences in unimodal anticipation and latent decision processes estimated by a hierarchical drift diffusion model (HDDM). Sixty-six participants (33 experts and 33 novices) completed a landing-region anticipation task under visual-only and auditory-only conditions. Behavioral performance was analyzed using mixed analyses of variance (ANOVAs), and accuracy and reaction time were jointly modeled with HDDM parameters: boundary separation (a), drift rate (v), non-decision time (t), and starting-point bias (z). Experts showed higher overall accuracy than novices, F(1, 64) = 56.46, p < 0.001, ηp² = 0.469, whereas reaction time did not differ significantly by group. The auditory-only condition produced higher accuracy, F(1, 64) = 12.69, p = 0.001, ηp² = 0.165, but longer reaction times, F(1, 64) = 150.32, p < 0.001, ηp² = 0.701. HDDM results showed higher drift rates in experts under both visual-only (BF10 = 1992.845) and auditory-only (BF10 = 24.354) conditions; auditory-only anticipation also involved higher boundary separation (BF10 = 53.095). These findings suggest that badminton expertise is associated with higher anticipatory accuracy and more efficient evidence accumulation under unimodal cue conditions, while auditory-only anticipation may also involve a more cautious decision threshold.

Background and aims: Whether athlete advantages in temporal processing primarily reflect sport-specific temporal knowledge or transfer to neutral laboratory judgments remains unresolved. Competitive swimming offers a theoretically informative case because successful performance depends on the precise regulation of pace and rhythm across repeated actions in a sensory-constrained environment. The present study examined whether swimming expertise is associated with superior performance in a neutral visual suprasecond duration-discrimination task and whether any expertise-related advantage remains observable across sensory contexts. Methods: Two independent experiments were conducted, each including 20 Expert Swimmers and 20 Amateur Controls. Participants completed a visual two-alternative forced-choice duration-discrimination task in which task difficulty was manipulated by the between-interval duration difference (200, 500, 1,000, and 2,000 ms). Experiment 1 was administered under silent visual conditions, whereas Experiment 2 used the same visual task while presenting task-irrelevant rhythmic auditory stimulation concurrently with each visual interval. Accuracy and reaction time (RT) were analyzed separately within each experiment. Results: In both experiments, discrimination accuracy increased as task difficulty decreased, confirming the effectiveness of the difficulty manipulation. Across difficulty levels, Expert Swimmers showed higher accuracy than Amateur Controls under both silent and task-irrelevant rhythmic conditions. Evidence for a larger expert advantage under higher difficulty emerged in Experiment 1 but was not reproduced in Experiment 2. Reaction-time findings did not indicate a generalized speed advantage, although difficulty-related variation in response patterning was observed. The rhythmic auditory background did not materially alter the overall accuracy advantage shown by Expert Swimmers. Conclusion: Swimming expertise was associated with enhanced performance in a neutral visual suprasecond duration-discrimination task across two sensory contexts. These findings indicate that the observed advantage was expressed primarily in discrimination accuracy rather than generalized response speed and remained observable when the task was embedded in a task-irrelevant rhythmic context. More broadly, the results support a bounded-transfer interpretation: swimmer expertise appears to extend beyond overtly sport-specific temporal content, but the present evidence does not support claims of unrestricted domain-general timing.