Abstract des Autors

This paper addresses the contribution that recent studies of hitting and catching have made to the understanding of the coordination between actors and their environment from an ecological psychological perspective. Experiments with top players in table tennis demonstrated that the skiful execution of an attacking forehand drive is governed by a finely tuned perception (time-to-contact) - action (acceleration) coupling. In the first reported catching experiment a directly manipulation of the optical expansion pattern of the approaching ball was carried out by using a deflating ball. Adjustments to the aperture of the hand in response to the different ball sizes - especially the adjustments of the hand to the deflating ball - point not only to a finely attuned perception-action coupling, but strongly indicate that such coupling is based on time-to-contact information. Learning is considered to be the direction of attention, with attention refering to the control of information detection. Novice table tennis players learning such a skill reveal changes not so much in the movement patterns produced, but rather in the attunement of their actions to specific visual information sources. Learning to catch a ball under conditions in which only the moving ball was visible resulted in a better performance under full light conditions than did training under such conditions, because the catchers are attending to information sources specifying the spatiotemporal information of the ball, implying that the learning process can be viewed as the establishment of a skill-specific perception-action coupling. Verf.-Referat