The impact of prolonged sports training on athletes’ brain functional activity remains inconclusive. A systematic review and coordinate-based meta-analysis of resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-MRI) is necessary to identify functional connectivity changes induced by prolonged sports training. A total of 31 studies were included in the systematic review, and 18 studies with 347 non-athletes and 327 athletes were analyzed using coordinate-based activation likelihood estimation (ALE) and seed-based d mapping with permutation of subject images (SDM-PSI) meta-analysis. Results revealed that greater functional connectivity in athletes in the paracentral lobule, medial frontal gyrus, precuneus, inferior parietal lobule, supramarginal gyrus, inferior frontal gyrus, Rolandic operculum, and median cingulate/paracingulate gyri (DCG). Consistent changes in the DCG were identified in closed-skill sports athletes. Furthermore, increased regional functional activity was observed in the posterior cingulate gyrus, lingual gyrus and cerebellum. Both meta-analytical methods emphasize altered functional activity within the default mode network (DMN), cerebellar network (CBN), ventral attention network (VAN), visual network (VA), and sensorimotor network (SMN). These findings suggest that long-term sport training optimizes connection strength and efficiency in brain regions associated with visual attention, cognitive and motor control in athletes. Overall, our study reveals shared neural adaptations across different types of athletes, offering new insights into the effects of long-term specific training on brain functional connectivity in specialists.

Action understanding involves two distinct processing levels that engage separate neural mechanisms: perception of concrete kinematic information and recognition of abstract action intentions. The mirror neuron system and the mentalizing system have both been linked to concrete action and abstract information processing, but their specific roles remain debatable. Here, we conducted a functional magnetic resonance imaging study with 26 participants who passively observed expected and unexpected actions. We performed whole-brain activation, region of interest, and effective connectivity analyses to investigate the neural correlates of these actions. Whole-brain activation analyses revealed that expected actions were associated with increased activation in the left medial superior frontal gyrus, while unexpected actions were linked to heightened activity in the left supramarginal gyrus, left superior parietal lobule, right inferior temporal gyrus, and left middle frontal gyrus. Region of interest analyses demonstrated that the left ventral premotor cortex exhibited greater activation during the observation of expected actions compared to unexpected actions, while the left inferior frontal gyrus, left superior parietal lobule, and left precuneus showed stronger activation during the observation of unexpected actions. Effective connectivity was observed between the left ventral premotor cortex and the left angular gyrus, left intraparietal sulcus, left dorsal premotor cortex, and left ventromedial prefrontal cortex with the middle frontal gyrus when observing unexpected, but not expected, actions. These findings suggest that expected actions are primarily processed by the mirror neuron system, whereas unexpected actions engage both the mirror neuron system and the mentalizing system, with these systems playing complementary roles in the understanding of unexpected actions.

During interpersonal interaction, understanding others’ actions requires the brain to continuously integrate information as behavior unfolds. Yet an action may deviate from its expected course and subsequently be corrected, raising the question of whether neural representations reflect only its eventual outcome or also retain information about how it developed. Here, we recorded electroencephalography from 20 expert table tennis players and 21 novices observing dyadic actions involving uninterrupted success, successfully corrected deviations, or goal-disrupting deviations. These conditions allowed us to distinguish information about an action’s preceding course from its eventual outcome. We combined time-resolved neural decoding, temporal generalization, and representational similarity analysis to characterize the differentiation and organization of unfolding actions. Neural activity differentiated the three action courses, with motor expertise selectively modulating their neural separability and temporal generalization. Critically, in experts, neural representational geometry corresponded to the shared preceding deviation of corrected and goal-disrupting actions despite their different outcomes. This correspondence remained significant after controlling for competing theoretical models and low-level visual and motion similarity. These findings suggest that neural representations of others’ actions incorporate information about their preceding course beyond their immediate observable state, highlighting how the brain preserves action history during unfolding dyadic actions.