Neural Mechanisms of Shooting Preparation Under High-Risk and High-Precision Tasks: A Multiscale EEG Study

During the shooting-preparation phase, shooters frequently encounter multiple interfering factors, such as task load, social evaluation, and complex environments. These factors can induce intricate changes in neural activity, leading to variations in shooting performance. This study aims to investigate the neural mechanisms underlying brain activity during the shooting preparation phase in high-risk tasks (e.g., Hostage-Rescue Condition) and high-precision tasks (e.g., Long-Range Condition).

Electroencephalographic (EEG) signals, the shooting performance metrics, and the self-report measures were collected from 30 shooters who completed shooting tasks under three conditions: Hostage-Rescue Condition, Long-Range Condition, and Close-Range Condition. EEG signals were subjected to sensor-level spectral analysis, source-level spectral analysis, functional connectivity analysis, and graph-theoretic analysis.

Compared with Close-Range Condition, shooters exhibited the following characteristics during Hostage-Rescue Condition and Long-Range Condition: (1) perceived pressure increased significantly; however, shooting score and aiming time improved significantly only in the Hostage-Rescue Condition; (2) significant differences were observed across multiple frequency bands and brain regions. Sensor-level spectral analysis revealed the greatest number of significant differences in beta-band event-related desynchronization/synchronization across conditions. Source-space analysis indicated that the theta band exhibited the highest number of significant differences across conditions; (3) functional connectivity between the frontal lobe and other lobes weakened significantly, whereas intra-lobar connectivity strengthened significantly. In addition, small-worldness increased, but the clustering coefficient and global efficiency decreased significantly.

Under Hostage-Rescue Condition and Long-Range Condition, shooters perceived greater pressure, yet the shooting score improved only under Hostage-Rescue Condition. Intra-lobar functional connectivity strengthened, whereas connectivity between the frontal lobe and other lobes was suppressed. Nodal clustering coefficients increased in vision-related regions but decreased in semantically related regions. These changes indicate that, when confronting Hostage-rescue and Long-Range Conditions, the brain achieves adaptive regulation by redistributing neural resources to optimize information-processing efficiency.