Visuo-motor delay, information–movement coupling, and expertise in ball sports

Abstract

We compared the performance of tennis experts and non-experts using a simulated interceptive task, in which the ball could be unexpectedly deviated 400 ms before contact. The results showed that experts were more accurate than non-experts when intercepting balls that deviated in their trajectory and that this could be explained by their shorter visuo-motor delay in adapting their interceptive movement. In addition, multiple regression analyses revealed that visuo-motor delay was a good predictor of accuracy in this task. Finally, accuracy in the simulated interceptive task was shown to be a reasonable predictor of expertise in tennis assessed by national ranking. In combination, the present results suggest that an important component of expertise in interceptive skills is fast information–movement coupling, which corresponds to a reduced delay in integrating vision and action. Our findings highlight the potential of the virtual interceptive task used here to predict performance in tennis.

Keywords:

• Interception
• information–movement coupling
• expertise
• ball sports

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Simon J. Bennett and Luis A. Teixeira for helpful comments on early versions of the manuscript. The experimental device was developed within the framework of the European Network of Enactive Interfaces, project #IST-2002-002114. We would like to thank ANR (Agence Nationale de la Recherche) for its support within the framework of the project Blan 06-1_134792.