Difficulty of Anticipating Left- vs. Right-footed Opponents' Kicks in Taekwondo

The purpose of this investigation was to examine the anticipation of taekwondo athletes when facing right- and left-footed kicks. Expert taekwondo athletes (n = 40; age = 20.935.12 years; Taekwondo Kyorugi competition experience = 7.584.49years) were shown identical video simulations of right-footed and left-footed chagi kicks. The videos were temporally paused at five different time occlusion points from the start to the end of the kicks. The participants were required to make prediction of kick types (front vs. back leg to head or trunk of opponent in kick attacks). The results indicated that anticipation of right-footed kicks was significantly more accurate than that of left-footed kicks. The footedness effect was found to be most pronounced when kicks videos were paused at 120 ms prior to the kick completion. Thus, the opponent’s footedness seems to affect visual anticipation of the type of an action. Mean percentages of correct predictions suggest that kyorugi taekwondo players may not adopt an optimal visual search strategy when facing left-footed kicks, resulting in fails in the detection of anticipation-relevant kinematic cues before the end of left-footed kicks in most instances (i.e., about 120 ms and more before the kick completion). It seems that the lower ability of recognizing the type of left- vs. right-footed opponents' kicks were due to the observers’ reduced perceptual awareness with left-footed actions