Effects of sport expertise on representational momentum during timing control

Abstract

Sports involving fast visual perception require players to compensate for delays in neural processing of visual information. Memory for the final position of a moving object is distorted forward along its path of motion (i.e., "representational momentum," RM). This cognitive extrapolation of visual perception might compensate for the neural delay in interacting appropriately with a moving object. The present study examined whether experienced batters cognitively extrapolate the location of a fast-moving object and whether this extrapolation is associated with coincident timing control. Nine expert and nine novice baseball players performed a prediction motion task in which a target moved from one end of a straight 400-cm track at a constant velocity. In half of the trials, vision was suddenly occluded when the target reached the 200-cm point (occlusion condition). Participants had to press a button concurrently with the target arrival at the end of the track and verbally report their subjective assessment of the first target-occluded position. Experts showed larger RM magnitude (cognitive extrapolation) than did novices in the occlusion condition. RM magnitude and timing errors were strongly correlated in the fast velocity condition in both experts and novices, whereas in the slow velocity condition, a significant correlation appeared only in experts. This suggests that experts can cognitively extrapolate the location of a moving object according to their anticipation and, as a result, potentially circumvent neural processing delays. This process might be used to control response timing when interacting with moving objects.

Is the perceived present a predictive model of the objective present?

“…This is in fact the case. The lag in the flash-lag effect varies from about 27 ms to about 90 ms (Arnold et al, 2009;Chakravarthi & VanRullen, 2012;Eagleman & Sejnowski, 2000van de Grind, 2002), but the amount of extrapolation in RM can be several hundred milliseconds (Nakamoto, Mori, Ikudome, Unenaka, & Imanaka (2015).…”

“…This can be contrasted with the flash-lag effect, where it has been found that active control of the moving stimulus by the participants reduced, rather than enhanced, the extent of the flash-lag effect (Ichikawa & Masakura, 2006), at least when the coupling between mouse movement and stimulus movement had a familiar directional relation (Ichikawa & Masakura, 2010). It is therefore most likely that extrapolation to the present and Extrapolation to the present 31 displacement are different phenomena, and that displacement is a case of extrapolation to guide interceptions (Nakamoto et al, 2015).…”

Temporal estimation in prediction motion tasks is biased by a moving destination

“…As in typical PM tasks where a target moves toward a stationary destination, we expected to find, for both Chase and Attract, changes in response times as target speed and occlusion period were varied (e.g., Peterken et al, 1991;Baurès et al, 2010;Bennett et al, 2010a;Zago et al, 2010;Nakamoto et al, 2015). Moreover, here we also sought to determine whether having a continuously visible moving destination biases the estimation of target speed during occlusion.…”

“…It has been suggested that performance in PM tasks is influenced by imposed oculomotor strategies (Bennett, Baurès, Hecht, & Benguigui, 2010a;Makin & Poliakoff, 2011), characteristics of target motion such as velocity (Sokolov & Pavlova 2003;Baurès, Oberfeld, & Hecht, 2010;Bennett et al, 2010a;Zago, Iosa, Maffei, & Lacquaniti, 2010;Nakamoto, Mori, Ikudome, Unenaka, & Imanaka, 2015), and the duration of target occlusion before it strikes the line (Peterken, Brown, & Bowman, 1991;Baurès et al, 2010). Other factors known to influence performance during PM tasks include the duration of visible motion (Sokolov & Pavlova, 2003), the target size (Sokolov & Pavlova 2003;Battaglini, Campana, & Casco, 2013), the presence of background texture (De Lucia, Tresilian, & Meyer, 2000;Battaglini, Campana, Camilleri, & Casco, 2014), motion aftereffects (Gilden, Blake, & Hurst, 1995;Battaglini et al, 2014), stimulus-to-background contrast (Battaglini et al, 2013), and the presence of visual distractors (Lyon & Waag, 1995).…”

“…In addition, prior experience of fastinterceptive tasks has been shown to influence PM performance. For example, expert baseball players mislocate suddenly disappearing targets (traversing left to right on a computer screen) as significantly further ahead than novice players (Nakamoto et al, 2015). It was suggested that this overestimation was the result of the experts' enhanced capability for motion prediction and that such domain-specific expertise may be advantageous in compensating for neural transmission and processing delays as well as for transient loss of visual information (e.g., from saccades, blinks, or target occlusion).…”