Badminton Players’ Expert Advantage in Anticipation Based on Visual and Auditory Cues: Evidence from the Drift Diffusion Model

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.