Cue informativeness constrains visual tracking during an interceptive timing task

摘要

Interceptive actions, such as catching, are a fundamental component of many activities and require knowledge of advanced kinematic information and ball flight characteristics to achieve successful performance. Rather than combining these sources of information, recent exploration of interceptive actions has presented them individually. Thus, it still is unclear how the information available from advanced cues influences eye movement behaviour. By integrating advanced visual information with novel ball projection technology, this study examined how the availability of advanced information, using four different cueing conditions: no image (ball flight only with no advanced information), non-informative (ball flight coupled with ball release information), directional (ball flight coupled with directional information), and kinematic (ball flight coupled with video of a throwing action), influenced visual tracking during a one-handed catching task. The findings illustrated no differences in catching performance across conditions; however, tracking of the ball was initiated earlier, for a longer duration, and over a greater proportion of the ball's trajectory in the directional and kinematic conditions. Significant differences between a directional cue and kinematic cue were not evident, suggesting a simple cue that provided information on the time of release and direction of ball flight was sufficient for successfully anticipating ball release and constraining eye movements. These findings highlight the relationship between advanced information and gaze behaviour during ball flight, and the performance of dynamic interceptive actions. We discuss the implications and potential limitations (e.g. variability between throwing image and ball projection) of the findings in the context of recent research on catching.