Representational Momentum in the Expertise Context: Support for the Theory of Event Coding as an Explanation for Action Anticipation

Relationships between the magnitude of representational momentum and the spatial and temporal anticipatory judgments of opponent's kicks in taekwondo

For successful actions in a fast, dynamic environment such as sports, a quick successful anticipation of a forthcoming environmental state is essential. However, the perceptual mechanisms involved in successful anticipation are not fully understood. This study examined the relationships between the magnitude of representational momentum (RM) as a forward displacement of the memory representation of the final position of a moving object (which implies that observers perceptually "see" a near future forthcoming dynamic environmental state) and the temporal and spatial anticipatory judgments of the opponent's high or middle kicks in taekwondo. Twenty-seven participants (university taekwondo club members and non-members) observed video clips of taekwondo kicks that vanished at one of 10 frame positions prior to the kick impact and performed three tasks consecutively: anticipatory coincidence timing (CT) with the arrival of kick impact, judgment of the kick type (high and middle kicks) by forced choice, and judgment of the vanishing frame position (measuring RM). Our results showed significant group effects for the number of correct kick-type judgments and the judgment threshold for kick-type choice (kick-typeJT), which was estimated in terms of individual psychometric function curves. A significant correlation was found between the magnitude of RM (estimated at kick-typeJT) and kick-typeJT, but not between the CT errors (estimated at kick-typeJT) and kick-typeJT. This indicates that the magnitude of RM may play an influential role in quick kick-type judgments, but not in coincidence timing while observing an opponent's kick motion. These findings suggest that subjective anticipatory perception or judgment of the future spatial state is vital to anticipatory actions under severe time constraints.

Agency and social affordance shape visual perception

Research on the sense of agency has shown that being the author of an action changes the way we estimate the timing and the intensity of the action-effect. Yet, there is a dearth of attempts to assess the influence of agency on perception per se. The present study used the Representational Momentum paradigm to measure participants' visual anticipation of movement while manipulating their agency. In line with previous literature emphasizing the impact of social factors on visual anticipation and on the sense of agency, we additionally investigated the modulating power of social affordances on the relationship between agency and visual anticipation. We conducted two experiments where participants viewed a virtual agent directing a handshake gesture toward a second virtual agent. In a first experiment, we addressed the role of agency on visual anticipation by comparing a condition in which participants triggered the virtual agent's gesture with a condition where the computer triggered the gesture. Results showed greater forward movement anticipation when participants triggered the gesture. The second experiment investigated how altering social interaction parameters (interindividual distance and body posture) modulated the relationship between agency and visual anticipation. The outcome contrasted with the first experiment, with participants anticipating a backward movement of the hand when the computer triggered the gesture and displaying a null anticipation when participants triggered the gesture. Those two experiments highlighted how active involvement and environmental affordance interact to shape perception and allowed us to propose an updated model of agency processing.

Developmental Changes in the Magnitude of Representational Momentum Among Nursery School Children: A Longitudinal Study

Representational momentum (RM) is a well-known phenomenon that occurs when a moving object vanishes suddenly and the memory of its final or vanishing position is displaced forward in the direction of its motion. Many studies have shown evidence of various perceptual and cognitive characteristics of RM in various daily aspects, sports, development, and aging. Here we examined the longitudinal developmental changes in the displacement magnitudes of RM among younger (5-year-old) and older (6-year-old) nursery school children for pointing and judging tasks. In our experiments, the children were asked to point at by their finger (pointing task) and judge the spatial location (judging task) of the vanishing point of a moving stimulus. Our results showed that the mean magnitudes of RM significantly decreased from 5- to 6-year-old children for the pointing and judging tasks, although the mean magnitude of RM was significantly greater in the 5-year-old children for the pointing task but not for the judging task. We further examined the developmental changes in RM for a wide range of ages based on data from the present study (5-year-old children) and our previous study (7- and 11-year-old children and 22-year-old adults). This ad hoc examination showed that the magnitude of RM was significantly greater in 5-year-old children than in adults for the pointing and judging tasks. Our findings suggest that the magnitude of RM was significantly greater in young children than in adults and significantly decreased in young children through adults for the pointing and judging tasks.

Constructing Expertise: Surmounting Performance Plateaus by Tasks, by Tools, and by Techniques

Acquiring expertise in a task is often thought of as an automatic process that follows inevitably with practice according to the log-log law (aka: power law) of learning. However, as Ericsson, Chase, and Faloon (1980) showed, this is not true for digit-span experts and, as we show, it is certainly not true for Tetris players at any level of expertise. Although some people may simply "twitch" faster than others, the limit to Tetris expertise is not raw keypress time but the techniques acquired by players that allow them to use the tools provided by the hardware and software to compensate for the game's relentlessly increasing drop speed. Unfortunately, these increases in drop speed between Tetris levels make performance plateaus very short and quickly followed by game death. Hence, a player's success at discovering, exploring, and practicing new techniques for the tasks of board preparation, board maintenance, optimal placement discovery, zoid rotation, lateral movement of zoids, and other tasks important to expertise in Tetris is limited. In this paper, we analyze data collected from 492 Tetris players to reveal the challenges they confronted while constructing expertise via the discovery of new techniques for gameplay at increasingly difficult levels of Tetris.

The Effect of Judgement Bias on Cue Utilization for Shot Prediction in Basketball Athletes

BACKGROUND

Concerning the judgments bias and cue utilization in basketball athletes, previous shot anticipation tasks were hard to examine in regards to whether the experts' judgement bias relies more on the cue of the player's body or the ball trajectory.

METHODS

Four types of body-ball cues shots were employed: IN-IN, IN-OUT, OUT-IN, and OUT-OUT. Four temporal stages (i.e., shooting, rising, high point, and falling) were divided during a shot. Forty-two participants predicted the fate of the ball after watching the shot videos.

RESULTS

The results suggested that for the shooting, rising, and high point phase, compared to the non-athletes, the experts provided superior predictions for IN-IN condition and OUT-IN condition but fewer accurate predictions for IN-OUT condition and OUT-OUT condition. Moreover, a higher bias toward predicting the shots as "in" for the athletes than the non-athletes under early temporal conditions was confirmed.

CONCLUSIONS

These findings strengthen the idea that the IN cues from both body information and ball trajectory could elicit the experts' judgement bias for made shots and then influence their response, thus rendered two distinct (e.g., impeding and facilitating) effects for the incongruent body-ball cues, respectively.