Badminton Players' Expert Advantage in Anticipation Based on Visual and Auditory Cues: Evidence from the Drift...

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.