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REVIEW article

Front. Sports Act. Living

Sec. Elite Sports and Performance Enhancement

Volume 7 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fspor.2025.1652165

This article is part of the Research TopicQuantifying and Optimizing Elite Performance Through Cognitive NeuroscienceView all articles

Brain network of athletes in motor imagery and action anticipation: an ALE meta-analysis and MACM analysis

Provisionally accepted
Yanqiu  WangYanqiu Wang1Yang  SunYang Sun1Jiangsheng  YuJiangsheng Yu1Xiaorong  ChengXiaorong Cheng1Zhebin  NiuZhebin Niu2*
  • 1Central China Normal University, Wuhan, China
  • 2China West Normal University, Nanchong, China

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

Understanding how athletes mentally simulate and anticipate actions provides key insights into experience-driven brain plasticity. While previous studies have investigated motor imagery and action anticipation separately, little is known about how their underlying neural mechanisms converge or diverge in expert performers. This study conducted a meta-analysis using activation likelihood estimation (ALE) and meta-analytic connectivity modeling (MACM) to compare brain activation patterns between athletes and non-athletes across both tasks. We systematically reviewed functional magnetic resonance imaging studies and included 20 eligible studies. ALE was used to identify consistent activation patterns, followed by contrast and conjunction analyses. MACM was used to further explored connectivity among key brain regions. Results showed that athletes exhibited stronger activation in the left middle and precentral gyrus during motor imagery, and in the superior frontal gyrus, bilateral precentral gyrus, and right middle frontal gyrus during action anticipation. Non-athletes showed greater activation in visual regions such as the middle occipital gyrus. Connectivity analyses revealed that athletes formed a cohesive fronto-parietal-temporal network integrating motor imagery and action prediction, which was not observed in non-athletes. These findings highlight a nested and efficient action observation network in athletes, supporting the integration of internally generated and externally guided action processes. This work advances models of perceptual-motor expertise and provides insight into how long-term sports training modulates brain plasticity.

Keywords: action anticipation1, motor imagery2, athletes3, neuroimaging4, activation likelihood estimation5, meta-analytic connectivity modeling6

Received: 23 Jun 2025; Accepted: 31 Jul 2025.

Copyright: © 2025 Wang, Sun, Yu, Cheng and Niu. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

* Correspondence: Zhebin Niu, China West Normal University, Nanchong, China

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