Anticipatory judgements associated with vision of an opponent’s end-effector: An approach by motion perturbation and spatial occlusion

This study was aimed at determining how the visual information of an end-effector (racket) and the intermediate extremity (arm) of a tennis server contribute to the receiver's anticipatory judgement of ball direction. In all, 15 experienced tennis players and 15 novice counterparts viewed a spatially occluded computer graphics animation of a tennis serve (no-occlusion, racket-occlusion, and body-occlusion) and made anticipatory judgements of ball direction on a visual analogue scale (VAS). The patterns of the serve motions were generated by a simulation technique that computationally perturbs the rotation speed of the selected racket-arm joint (forearm pronation and elbow extension) on a captured serve motion. The results suggested that the anticipatory judgements were monotonically attuned with the perturbation rate of the forearm pronation speed excepting under the conditions of the racket-occlusion model. Although such attunements were not observed in the elbow perturbation conditions, the results of correlation analysis indicated that the residual information in the spatially occluded models had a similar effect to the no-occlusion model within the individual experienced participants. The findings support the notion that end-effector (racket) provides deterministic cues for anticipation, as well as imply that players are able to benefit from the relative motion of an intermediate extremity (elbow extension).