Action inductions by the visual perception of movement in sports

In sports action situations, we visually perceive a variety of motion information. This information consists of spatial features such as positions and running paths of teammates and opponents in sports games, trajectories of balls, attacking and defending actions of the opponent in martial arts, and so on. This visually perceived movement information is integrated into one's own action planning. The integration into the own action control can take place thereby completely automatically, i.e. unconsciously. This circumstance becomes especially relevant when fast reactions to changing environmental situations are required, as is often the case in sports. The influence of visually perceived motion features on the observer's action control is the subject of this research project. Previous findings on this are limited to linear movements (from right to left and vice versa) and very simple stimulus environments (movements of simple geometric elements, point clouds, light point runners etc.) (e.g. Bosbach, 2004, Wittfoth et al., 2006). Here, these findings are extended by other types of movements (rotational movements and depth movements) as well as simple (movements of a/a circle/sphere) and complex stimulus environments (real movements of an athlete). For this purpose, reaction time experiments were developed using the Simon paradigm. The results show that visual perception of both rotational and deep movements induces intended spatially compatible actions (right or left or proximal or distal key press), which is reflected in shorter reaction times. The complexity of the stimulus event does not play a role. Further investigations are planned to test the relevance of automatically induced action tendencies for action situations in sports.