Timing an attacking forehand drive in table tennis.

Abstract

Comparison of initial and terminal temporal accuracy of 5 male top table tennis players performing attacking forehand drives led to the conclusion that because of a higher temporal accuracy at the moment of ball/bat contact than at initiation the players did not fully rely on a consistent movement production strategy. Functional trial-to-trial variation was evidenced by negative correlations between the perceptually specified time-to-contact at the moment of initiation and the mean acceleration during the drive; within-trial adaptation was also evident for two of the Ss. It is argued that task constraints provide the organizing principles for perception and action at the same time, thereby establishing a mutual dependency between the two. Allowing for changes in these parameters over time, a unified explanation is suggested that does not take recourse to large amounts of (tacit) knowledge on the part of the S. Expert performers in ball games, such as baseball (Hubbard & Seng, 1954), table tennis (Bootsma & Van Wieringen, 1988; Tyldesley & Whiting, 1975), and field hockey (Franks, Weicker, & Robertson, 1985), have been shown to execute their drives with remarkably consistent movement times, that

Cites (4)

1. A Mathematical Theory of Communication
   Shannon, C. E. · 1948 · Bell System Technical Journal
2. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception
   Bornstein, Marc H., Gibson, James J. · 1980 · The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
3. A Theory of Visual Control of Braking Based on Information about Time-to-Collision
   Lee, David N · 1976 · Perception
4. Plummeting gannets: a paradigm of ecological optics
   Lee, David N., Reddish, Paul E. · 1981 · Nature

Show all 4 references

Cited by (18)

1. EXPERT AND EXCEPTIONAL PERFORMANCE: Evidence of Maximal Adaptation to Task Constraints
   Ericsson, K. A., Lehmann, A. C. · 1996 · Annual Review of Psychology
2. From eye movements to actions: how batsmen hit the ball
   Land, Michael F., McLeod, Peter · 2000 · Nature Neuroscience
3. The contribution of muscle properties in the control of explosive movements
   van Soest, Arthur J., Bobbert, Maarten F. · 1993 · Biological Cybernetics
4. Key Properties of Expert Movement Systems in Sport: An Ecological Dynamics Perspective
   Seifert, Ludovic, Button, Chris, Davids, Keith · 2013 · Sports Medicine
5. Decomposition of Variability in the Execution of Goal-Oriented Tasks: Three Components of Skill Improvement.
   Müller, Hermann, Sternad, Dagmar · 2004 · Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance

See all 546