Title: “Assessing the contributions of perception and motor experience to visual anticipation skill”
Supervisor: Dr. Nicola Hodges
Committee members: Dr. Romeo Chua, Dr. Sean Müller (Federation University Australia)
Abstract: An athlete’s ability to predict the actions of another athlete is related to their experience in watching the actions (perceptual experience) and doing the actions themselves (motor experience). The relative contributions of these experiences are debated and is thought to impact on how predictions are made. In many sports, athletes have both motor and perceptual experiences and hence these are hard to tease apart. Baseball is an exception, as hitters and pitchers have specialized roles, resulting in different amounts of watching (perceptual experience) and doing (motor experience) with a pitcher’s actions. My primary aim is to study the action prediction abilities of both types of baseball athletes to determine the relative contribution of motor experience (specifically with pitching) to visual experience (specifically when hitting) in action prediction performance. Individuals will watch videos that are frozen in time to occlude outcomes and will be asked to judge pitch type. I will manipulate pitching hand seen in the videos to examine how specific judgements are to the motor and visual experiences of the athletes (and indirectly make conclusions about how predictions are made). Data will be correlated with objective measures of hitting performance (in hitters), to help isolate the role of pitch discrimination in hitting accuracy. This research will provide insights into what types of experiences help athletes make sport-specific action predictions and how these are made, helping to inform theory and support future interventions comparing physical training (e.g., providing motor experience with the perceived action) to perceptual-based training methods.