Jacob Howard likes watching sports, but hockey is the one he gets most excited about.
“It’s fast-paced,” he said in uptown Waterloo during an outdoor viewing of Game 3 of the Stanley Cup finals where the Edmonton Oilers are taking on the Florida Panthers.
“It’s physical, it’s exciting. There are plays that make me go like, ‘ooh’ or cover my face. It’s something I can get really passionate about, which I can’t really feel about things like football or baseball.”
He says watching a game with other people, like the watch party in Waterloo Town Square on June 10, really adds to the enjoyment of the game.
“I’d rather watch the game with a bunch of people than just alone in my living room,” Howard said.
Ethan Loginov, who plays hockey himself, says there’s something special about watching a Stanley Cup finals game.
“I’m just seeing the best in the world doing what they are the best at, seeing why they’re the best, seeing things that you know as a hockey player that you could never do and being able to watch that every day is awesome,” Loginov said.
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As the two hockey fans watched that game, new research from the University of Waterloo suggests their brains may have processed the game in a different way than people who had only recently jumped on the Edmonton Oilers (or Florida Panthers) bandwagon.
Luke Potwarka, a lead researcher in the university’s department of recreation and leisure studies and co-author of a new study, says they asked people to watch hockey as part of a proof-of-concept study to test a non-invasive brain imaging device called functional near infrared spectroscopy.
“Sometimes it’s really difficult for spectators to accurately describe their experiences or how they were judging or evaluating the game that they were watching. And oftentimes we don’t get a sense of some of the real time experiences that spectators have as the game unfolds,” Potwarka said.
First, they asked students about their hockey fandom, then they put them into two groups: low and high involvement with hockey.
Then they asked 20 of the students to go to the lab where they watched 20 minutes of a 2018 European Hockey League game, between the Cardiff Devils and the Nottingham Panthers, and they were asked to pick a team to cheer for as they watched.
“We coded it and timed it for all key scoring chances and faceoff opportunities and we took and analyzed brain imaging slices 10 seconds before and after each scoring chance and offensive faceoffs during the period,” Potwarka said.
Adrian Safati, a PhD candidate in the school’s department of psychology who contributed to the study, said they found there was greater activity in a part of the brain called the dorsal medial prefrontal cortex during moments like faceoffs.
“We found that passionate fans had greater activation in their medial prefrontal cortex. This is part of the brain that’s responsible for evaluating and judging social situations,” Safati said.
Safati said they chose a game that specifically wasn’t high stakes, because they wanted to control for subjective feelings. That would count out a Stanley Cup game, like Tuesday’s Game 6 with the Panthers leading the best-of-seven series 3-2.
For example, the fans may have reacted differently if it was Oilers superstar Connor McDavid in the faceoff as opposed to centre Joey Martin, of Thorold, Ont., who played with the Cardiff Devils in 2018.
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Potwarka says this is the first time, to their knowledge, that a functional near infrared spectroscopy has been used to study a fan’s reaction to sports, but there are other opportunities where it can be used, including in health prevention and other social science experiments.
He says next, they want to see how the brain reacts to other sports.
“We want to see, how does the brain function in soccer? How does it function when it’s processing basketball games or even curling for that matter? I don’t know. But we really want to try it,” he said.
There could also be a chance to look at how commentary during those games impacts a person’s experience of the game and it could help broadcasters better understand what works for fans and casual viewers and what isn’t connecting for them.
“I think another key exciting area of research for us to think about is how brain activation might be different in social viewing situations with groups of people such as viewing parties versus this was just the individual viewership experience in our study. So there’s lots of potential moving forward,” Potwarka added.
Safati said he is interested in the social aspect, whether there’s a contagious effect where if one person is really invested in what they’re watching, that could transfer to friends or others watching the game, too.
The study is titled Understanding the sport viewership experience using functional near-infrared spectroscopy and was published in April in the journal Scientific Reports.
