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. 2019 Jul 18:13:231.
doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2019.00231. eCollection 2019.

Gender Differences in Throwing Revisited: Sensorimotor Coordination in a Virtual Ball Aiming Task

Dena Crozier  1   2 , Zhaoran Zhang  3 , Se-Woong Park  2 , Dagmar Sternad  1   2   4
Affiliations

Gender Differences in Throwing Revisited: Sensorimotor Coordination in a Virtual Ball Aiming Task

Dena Crozier et al. Front Hum Neurosci. .

Abstract

Numerous studies have demonstrated that boys throw balls faster, farther and more accurately than girls. This may be largely due to well-known anatomical and muscle-physiological differences that play a central role in overarm throwing. With the objective to understand the potential contribution of the equally essential coordinative aspects in throwing for this gender difference, this large cross-sectional study examined a simplified forearm throw that eliminated the requirements that give males an advantage.While the overall performance error indeed became similar in the age groups younger than 20 years and older than 50 years, it was attenuated for middle-aged individuals. The gender differences remained in individuals who reported no throwing experience, but females with throwing experience reached similar performance as males. Two fine-grained spatiotemporal metrics displayed similar age-dependent gender disparities: while overall, males showed better spatiotemporal coordination of the ball release, age group comparisons specified that it was particularly middle-aged females that made more timing errors and did not develop a noise-tolerant strategy as males did. As throwing experience did not explain this age-dependency, the results are discussed in the context of spatial abilities and video game experience, both more pronounced in males. In contrast, a measure of rhythmicity developed over successive throws only revealed weak gender differences, speaking to the fundamental tendency in humans to fall into rhythmic patterns. Only the youngest individuals between 5 and 9 years of age showed significantly less rhythmicity in their performance. This computational study was performed in a large cohort in the context of an outreach activity, demonstrating that robust quantitative measures can also be obtained in less controlled environments. The findings also alert that motor neuroscience may need to pay more attention to gender differences.

Keywords: age-dependency; gender difference; intrinsic rhythmicity; throwing; timing ability.

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Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Demographics of subjects. Blue and red bars represent the number of male and female subjects. Dark blue and dark red indicate subjects who had throwing experience in each age bin. Light blue and light red bars represent the number of male and female subjects who had no throwing experience in each age bin.
Figure 2
Figure 2
(A) Experimental set-up. Subjects are seated in front of the computer screen and grasp the ball affixed to the end of a lever arm, mounted on a tripod. (B) Left: Real skittles task: A ball attached to a vertical pole with a string. Right: Top-down projection of the skittles task presented on the computer screen. The purple bar rotates as subjects move their forearm about the elbow on the lever arm. The white circle representing the ball was released from the purple bar as the force sensor on the ball was released. Upon release, the elliptical trajectory of the ball’s path was shown. The two dashed trajectories show two different ball releases that resulted in a target hit; the solid trajectory shows a ball release that resulted in a non-zero performance error.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Calculation of timing error and timing window. (A) Visual representation of timing error in an exemplary throw. The result space spanned by angle and velocity at ball release is color-coded, with black representing post hits, and shades of gray indicating an error larger than 5 cm. The white line is the solution manifold, representing zero error, or balls whose trajectory went exactly through the center of the target. The green band around the solution manifold represents throws with errors less than the 5 cm threshold, which were also counted as target hits. The arm trajectory is shown in purple, and the subject’s release time is represented by the red point. The ideal release time is marked by the green point, representing the ball release that would have resulted in minimum error. (B) The purple trajectory depicts the performance error that would result from each point on the arm trajectory. The time was aligned with the time at which the minimum performance error would occur (green point). The timing error was the time difference between actual (red point) and ideal release (green point). Note that while the units of this measure are milliseconds, this is a spatiotemporal metric. (C) Visual representation of timing window with an exemplary throw. The arm trajectory is shown in purple. The yellow region along the arm trajectory marks the segment of the trajectory in which any release would result in a target hit. (D) The performance error against the time depicted in the same way as timing error. Timing window (yellow region) is the segment of the trajectory that would result in errors below the 5 cm threshold.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Arm trajectories and inter-throw intervals (ITI). The upper and lower panels show the angle of the lever arm during Block 1 and Block 4 from one subject. The red points mark the moments of ball release. The inter-throw interval was defined as the time between two successive ball releases.
Figure 5
Figure 5
Number of target hits, post hits, and overall scores over practice. The green, black and red points represent the cumulative numbers of target hits, post hits and scores within each block, respectively. The dark red line highlights the final score of each block that was presented to the subjects as feedback.
Figure 6
Figure 6
Performance error and post hits. (A) Upper panel: mean performance errors of male (blue) and female (red) subjects across 100 practice throws. Error bars represent the standard error across subjects for each trial. The red and blue curves are power functions regressed to the data. Lower panel: total number of post hits of each throw separated by gender. (B) Upper panel: mean performance error in the last block separated by age groups. Error bars represent standard errors. Shaded areas are the 95% confidence intervals. Lower panel: average number of post hits per gender and age bin in the last block.
Figure 7
Figure 7
Timing error. (A) Timing error of male and female subjects across 100 practice throws. Error bars represent the standard error across subjects for each trial. The solid lines are power functions regressed to the data. (B) Mean timing error of the last block separated by gender and age group; error bars are the standard errors. The shaded areas are the 95% confidence intervals.
Figure 8
Figure 8
Timing window. (A) Timing window of male and female subjects across 100 practice throws; the error bars represent the standard error across subjects per trial. (B) Timing window of the last block separated by gender and age group; error bars are the standard errors. The shaded areas are the 95% confidence intervals.
Figure 9
Figure 9
Rhythmicity. (A) Rhythmicity measured by quartile variation coefficient (QVC)-inter-throw-intervals (ITI) in a moving window of 25 trials across practice throws in both males and females; error bars represent the standard error across subjects per window. (B) QVC-ITI of the last block (corresponding to the last two points in panel A) separated by gender and age group; error bars represent standard errors. The shaded areas are the 95% confidence intervals.
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