The ability to anticipate an opponent’s behavior has proved a reliable discriminator of athletes and novice performers in many reactive sports including badminton, soccer, tennis and basketball. But, the majority of questions are equivocal, such as the superior anticipation of the athletes exists in simple percipience task or realistic stimuli anticipation task, the feature of athletes’ underlying process in anticipation, and the Event related potential(ERP) effects of superior action anticipation in athletes. The study here was done to solve the above questions deeply. Experiment 1 was to explore the mechanism of athletes’ underlying process of the anticipating task. The subjects were asked to anticipate the realistic stimuli of different temporal occlusions. And then uniting the accuracy ratings and self-confidence ratings with the distribution of solution probabilities of the perceptual anticipation task were analyzed. The accuracy rate of athletes in deceptive movement was significantly lower than that in no-deceptive(normal) movement; Athletes’ accuracy and confidence ratings of deceptive movement were superior than novices’; The test item solution probabilities were found to be more widely distributed in athletes than novices in deceptive movement task. The multi-task approach was used in experiment 2. The deceptive movement’s RTs and normal movement’s RTs were measured with two types of stimuli. The results showed that both RTs and accuracy rate were significantly different between the athletes and the novices in deceptive movement with the realistic stimuli. In experiment 3, we compared basketball athletes with novices in the brain responses of ERP when they watched sequential clips of basketball games and predicted the direction change of opponent. There were significant differences between the athletes and novices in the aspects of amplitude of N2 component in frontal-central region，P2 latency，and amplitude of parietal-occipital region. Based on the results of the three experiments，we drew our conclusions as follows: (1)The deceptive movement is more sensitive than normal movement; (2) Only under the condition of complex realistic stimuli tasks，did the athletes perform better，and the reason is that the athletes may be familiar with this sport stimuli; (3)Athletes usually use inferential(heuristic-based) judgments in all conditions, however, novices use direct-perceptual(invariant-based) judgments; (4)Athletes input less cognitive resources during the perception period, can make decisions quickly, and show significant advantages in anticipation.