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Part of
Moving Bodies in Interaction – Interacting Bodies in Motion: Intercorporeality, interkinesthesia, and enaction in sports
Edited by Christian Meyer and Ulrich v. Wedelstaedt
[Advances in Interaction Studies 8] 2017
► pp. 93–111

Chapter 4
Visual and motor components of action anticipation in basketball and soccer

Time demanding sports require the ability to form anticipatory representations of on-going actions to complete missing perceptual information and anticipate timely motor responses. Compared to novices, elite athletes are endowed with unique abilities to foresee, predict and anticipate the future of opponents’ actions. In the present chapter, I use a cognitive neuroscience approach to address the issue of whether and how these superior perceptual abilities derive from athletes’ previous motor experience or visual familiarity. I discuss a series of behavioral and neuroscientific studies that have tested the role of motor and visual components of sport expertise and suggest that excellence in sports relies on complimentary and flexible use of motor and visual anticipatory models of ongoing actions, especially when facing players that attempt to fool the observer.

Keywords: action prediction, motor expertise, mirror neurons, embodiment, familiarity, transcranial magnetic stimulation, temporal occlusion, body kinematics, motor learning, motor simulation, visual perception, action observation
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • Action prediction in sport
  • Predicting fooling actions
  • Functional role of motor and visual areas in action prediction
  • Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 14 August 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ais.8.04urg
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