Abstract
Participants in this study practiced with feedback to anticipate the left-right direction of forehand tennis shots played by stick-figure players. A technique based on principal component analysis was used to remove dynamical differences that are associated with shots to different directions. Different body regions of the stick-figure players were neutralized with this procedure in the pretests and posttests, and in the practice phases. Experiment 1 showed that training is effective if during practice information is consistently present in the whole body of the player, but not if the information is neutralized in the whole body in half of the practice trials. Experiment 2 showed that training is effective if the variance associated with the direction of the shots is consistently present in one body region but neutralized in others, and that transfer occurs from practice with information in one body region to performance in conditions with information preserved only in other regions. Experiment 3 showed that occlusion has a much larger detrimental effect on learning than the applied neutralization technique, and that transfer between body regions occurs also with occlusion. Discussed are theoretical implications for understanding how biological motion is perceived and possible applications in a type of training referred to as reduced usefulness training.
Highlights
Humans are often remarkably skilled at perceiving another person’s intentions from their movements
In the posttest, the reliable group performed better than the unreliable and no practice groups, demonstrating that a consistent presentation of information rather than a mere exposure to the stimuli leads to improvements in anticipation skill
The posttest accuracy scores for the reliable group were significantly higher than for the other two groups on the control condition. These findings are consistent with the claim that practice with a set of stimuli in which shot-specific differences are consistently available in all regions allows learners to discover movement patterns that systematically co-vary with shot outcome
Summary
Humans are often remarkably skilled at perceiving another person’s intentions from their movements. Researchers have searched for detectable kinematic patterns that reveal the to-beperceived intentions [1], [2] or have focused on forward models and other internal constructs that are hypothesized to underlie the capacity to anticipate [3], [4]. As indicated by the former approach, the detection of information that specifies the intentions, which are causally linked to the outcomes of the considered actions, is critical for anticipatory behavior. If an individual wishes to become a skillful anticipator, (s)he must learn to attend to the movement patterns that reliably indicate the outcomes of those actions
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