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ABSTRACT. The authors studied changes in performance and kinematics during the acquisition of a l-handed catch. Participants were 8 women who took an intensive 2-week training program during which they [...]

ABSTRACT. The authors examined the complex interactions between perception, cognition, and expertise by using a film-based decision-making test. They stratified 40 youth soccer players (aged 13.0-15.8 years) into groups by [...]

ABSTRACT. The authors ran 3 experiments to investigate how catchers deal with the horizontal component of the ball's trajectory in an interception task during locomotion. The experiments were built upon [...]

The aim of this study was to compare prosaccadic and antisaccadic eye movements of experts in ball sports and controls. In the prosaccadic and antisaccadic task, subjects made saccades respectively towards and away from a suddenly appearing stimulus. By means of infrared-oculography, we compared horizontal eye movements of experts (n=18) and controls (n=20). Experts had shorter overall saccadic latencies, but significantly shorter latencies occurred only on the antisaccade task, not on the prosaccade task. Our findings seem to support the concept that prosaccades and antisaccades have different underlying mechanisms and that expertise in ball games mainly improves antisaccadic performance in terms of latency and variability.

The aim of this study was to compare one-handed catching performance between catchers with high (n=10) and low (n=10) binocular depth vision or stereopsis. In two sessions of 90 trials, tennis balls were projected at three different velocities towards the subject's shoulder region. Participants with good stereopsis were more successful, although the difference in number of correct catches fell short of significance. More specifically, catchers with low stereopsis made more temporal errors, but no differences in spatial errors. As the velocity of the ball increased, the initiation of the catch was delayed and catching performance decreased. The finding that stereopsis affected timing of the catch challenges the 'monocular tau hypothesis' in the control of interceptive timing, while the velocity effect shows that the act of catching a ball is not initiated at a constant time-to-contact.

A study was conducted to examine the role of preparatory heart rate deceleration on balance performance of female gymnasts. Findings suggest that preparatory heart deceleration is detrimental to the performance of difficult movements on the balance beam of female gymnasts.

The mechanisms that underlie decision-making skills in soccer are examined through an analysis of the differences in decision-making skill and visual search behavior.