Sitting on a fastball.

This is the first study to show that when baseball batters fail to hit change-ups it is because they sit on a fastball. Sitting on a fastball refers to a strategy of baseball batters to always expect a fastball (a fast type of pitch), because expecting slower balls would result in too late movement initiation for unexpected fastballs. Here the authors analyzed movement patterns of highly talented baseball batters facing randomly presented fastballs and change-ups (a slower type of pitch). Results revealed that when batters failed to a hit change-up, this was due to too fast movement initiation patterns that were highly similar to those typically associated with fastballs. More specifically, the movement initiation pattern was not adjusted to the slower speeds of change-ups, resulting in a miss. To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first behavioral experiment showing that the strategy of sitting on a fastball exists, and how it affects batting performance on change-ups.

Reality-based practice under pressure improves handgun shooting performance of police officers.

The current study examined whether reality-based practice under pressure may help in preventing degradation of handgun shooting performance under pressure for police officers. Using a pre-post-test design, one group of nine police officers practised handgun shooting under pressure evoked by an opponent who also fired back using marking (coloured soap) cartridges. The control group (n = 8) practised handgun shooting on standard cardboard targets instead of real opponents. Within a fortnight after the pre-test, both groups received three training sessions of 1 h, in which each person fired a total of 72 rounds. During the pre- and post test each participant took 30 shots without pressure (cardboard targets) and 30 shots under additional pressure (with an opponent firing back). While during the pre-test both groups performed worse in front of an opponent firing back compared to the cardboard targets, after the training sessions shooting performance of the experimental group no longer deteriorated with an opponent while performance of the control group was equally harmed as during the pre-test. These results indicate that training exercises involving increased pressure can acclimatize shooting performance of ordinary police officers to those situations with elevated pressure that they may encounter during their police work.

Basketball jump shooting is controlled online by vision.

An experiment was conducted to examine whether basketball jump shooting relies on online visual (i.e., dorsal stream-mediated) control rather than motor preprogramming. Seventeen expert basketball players (eight males and nine females) performed jump shots under normal vision and in three conditions in which movement initiation was delayed by zero, one, or two seconds relative to viewing the basket. Shots were evaluated in terms of both outcome and execution measures. Even though most shots still landed near the basket in the absence of vision, end-point accuracy was significantly better under normal visual conditions than under the delay conditions, where players tended to undershoot the basket. In addition, an overall decrease of inter-joint coordination strength and stability was found as a function of visual condition. Although these results do not exclude a role of motor preprogramming, they demonstrate that visual sensory information plays an important role in the continuous guidance of the basketball jump shot.

Information and action in punching a falling ball.

Lee, Young, Reddish, Lough, and Clayton (1983) reported that the timing control of jumping and vertically punching a dropping ball exploits the inverse of the rate of change of optical expansion, tau(r). We raise a number of methodological and logical criticisms against their experiment and conclusions and attempt to rectify them by examining elbow joint angles only, in seated punchers, under both monocular and binocular conditions, with two ball sizes, dropped from two heights. Differences between the binocular and monocular cases suggest the exploitation of different information. We present several techniques to help determine the operative variable(s) controlling the action. The optical variable used to initiate and guide flexion appeared to be expansion velocity (looming), rather than tau(r); extension appeared to be under the control of different variables in the monocular and binocular cases. Simulations using single variables and single perceptuo-motor intervals were of mixed success.

Shedding some light on catching in the dark: perceptual mechanisms for catching fly balls.

To catch a lofted ball, a catcher must pick up information that guides locomotion to where the ball will land. The acceleration of tangent of the elevation angle of the ball (AT) has received empirical support as a possible source of this information. Little, however, has been said about how the information is detected. Do catchers fixate on a stationary point, or do they track the ball with their gaze? Experiment 1 revealed that catchers use eye and head movements to track the ball. This means that if AT is picked up retinally, it must be done by means of background motion. Alternatively, AT could be picked up by extraretinal mechanisms, such as the vestibular and proprioceptive systems. In Experiment 2, catchers reliably ran to intercept luminous fly balls in the dark, that is, in absence of a visual background, under both binocular and monocular viewing conditions. This indicates that the optical information is not detected by a retinal mechanism alone.

The effects of baseball experience on movement initiation in catching fly balls.

Previous research has shown that skilled athletes are able to respond faster than novices to skill-specific information. The aim of this study was to ascertain whether expert outfielders are faster than non-experts in acting on information about the flight of a fly ball. It was hypothesized that expert outfielders are better attuned to this information; as a result, faster and more accurate responses were expected. This hypothesis was tested by having non-expert and expert outfielders judge, as quickly as possible, where a ball would land in the front-behind dimension (perceptual condition) and, in another condition, to attempt to catch such balls (catching condition). The results of the perceptual condition do not support the hypothesis that expert outfielders are more sensitive to ball flight information than non-experts, but the results of the catching condition reveal that experts are more likely to initiate locomotion in the correct direction.

The relevance of action in perceiving affordances: perception of catchableness of fly balls.

The catchableness of a fly ball depends on whether the catcher can get to the ball in time; accurate judgments of catchableness must reflect both spatial and temporal aspects. Two experiments examined the perception of catchableness under conditions of restricted information pickup. Experiment 1 compared perceptual judgments with actual catching and revealed that stationary observers are poor perceivers of catchableness, as would be expected by the lack of information about running capabilities. In Experiment 2, participants saw the 1st part of ball trajectories before their vision was occluded. In 1 condition, they started to run (as if to catch the ball) before occlusion; in another, they remained stationary. Moving judgments were better than stationary judgments. This supports the idea that perceiving affordances that depend on kinematic, rather than merely geometric, body characteristics may require the relevant action to be performed.

Visual information about time-to-collision between two objects.

In a forced-choice paradigm, human observers' sensitivity to visual information specifying a moving object's future time of arrival at a designated position in the field of view was evaluated. A geometrical analysis demonstrated that information specifying a first-order temporal relationship (i.e., without taking changes in velocity into account) is available in the combination of the relative rate of dilation of the optical contour of the moving object and the relative rate of constriction of the optical gap separating the moving object from the target position. Observers were sensitive to information contained in the relative rate of constriction of the optical gap if no contour dilation component was present and to the combination of information contained in the relative rates of dilation of the optical contour of the moving object and constriction of the optical gap if both were present albeit with a differential weighting of the 2 components.