Volition has been considered as a psychological construct, being used to describe one’s endogenous mental act of forming, maintaining, and implementing an intention or goal, which has a great emphasis on the sense of agency. However, little research has revealed the neural mechanisms of volitional quality due to the difficulties of empirical research.

Elite athletes are a group of experts with extraordinary physical abilities and mental attributes. Winter sports are sports that have great requirements for physical endurance and independent decision-making capabilities to navigate the snow and ice equipment. Therefore, they provide a unique opportunity to investigate the volitional quality.

Recently, a research team led by Dr.WEI Gao-xia from the Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, systematically investigated the brain morphometric characteristics related to volitional quality. The research recruited 16 national-level athletes who engage in short track speed skating and 18 healthy controls matched with age and gender. They used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to scan all participants’ brain and administrate the Scale of Volitional Quality to compare their morphometric and behavioral differences between two groups.

They found that professional athletes exhibited excellent volitional qualities, as well as thicker cortexes in the left precuneus, the left inferior parietal lobule, and the right superior frontal gyrus, which are the core brain regions involving th e sense of agency.

In addition, the mean cortical thickness of the left inferior parietal lobe was significantly correlated with the independence of volitional quality. These findings suggest that sports training is an ideal model for better understanding the neural mechanisms of volitional behaviors in the human brain.

   Image courtesy of Dr.WEI Gao-xia

This work entitled "No Pain No Gain’: Evidence from a Parcel-Wise Brain Morphometry Study on the Volitional Quality of Elite Athletes" was published online in Brain Sciences on July 7. It was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant number 31671163) and the CAS Key Laboratory of Mental Health, Institute of Psychology (grant number KLMH2011ZK07), as well as the Open Research Fund of the CAS Key Laboratory of Behavioral Science, Institute of Psychology.

Contact:
Ms.Chen LIU
Institute of Psychology
Email: liuc@psych.ac.cn