Expert advantage in multisensory anticipation during sport depends on integrable audiovisual evidence

Background and objective Expert anticipation in racket sports may depend not only on superior visual cue use but also on whether auditory and visual cues can be used as coherent decision evidence. This study tested the boundary conditions of expert advantage in badminton anticipation and decomposed performance using hierarchical drift diffusion modeling.Methods Across three experiments, badminton experts and novices completed two-choice anticipation tasks. Experiment 1 manipulated modality availability: congruent audiovisual, auditory-only, and visual-only. Experiment 2 manipulated audiovisual temporal order: synchronous, auditory-leading, and visual-leading. Experiment 3 manipulated cross-modal relation: congruent, noncontingent, and incongruent audiovisual cues. Accuracy, correct response time, cross-experiment generalized estimating equations, and hierarchical drift diffusion model parameters were analyzed.Results Experts showed higher accuracy than novices across experiments, but not a uniform speed advantage. In Experiment 1, auditory-only and congruent audiovisual conditions improved accuracy relative to visual-only, whereas visual-only produced the fastest responses. In Experiment 2, auditory-leading trials were associated with faster responses. In Experiment 3, the expert accuracy advantage was strongest in congruent audiovisual trials, reduced under noncontingent cues, and absent under incongruent cues. HDDM results indicated that drift rate was the most consistent decision-level marker of expertise, whereas boundary separation and non-decision time showed more condition-dependent patterns.Conclusion Expert advantage in badminton anticipation depends on coherent and task-relevant audiovisual evidence, with limited support for a general benefit from adding multiple sensory channels. The keypress paradigm indexes controlled perceptual anticipation, not continuous sport action selection.