Angle-of-approach and reversal-movement effects in lateral manual interception.

The present study sought to replicate two non-intuitive effects reported in the literature on lateral manual interception of uniformly moving targets, the angle-of-approach (AoA) effect and the reversal-movement (RM) effect. Both entail an influence of the target trajectory's incidence angle on the observed interceptive hand movements along the interception axis; they differ in the interception location considered. The AoA effect concerns all trajectory conditions requiring hand movement to allow successful interception, while the RM effect concerns the particular condition where the target will in fact arrive at the hand's initial position and no hand movement is therefore required but nevertheless regularly produced.

Toward an Operational Dynamical Model of Lateral Manual Interception Behavior.

We develop a dynamics-based model of discrete movement for lateral manual interception capable of generating movements with realistic kinematics. For the present purposes, we focus on the situation of to-be-intercepted targets moving at constant speed along rectilinear trajectories oriented orthogonally with respect to the interception axis. The proposed phenomenological model is designed to capture the time evolution of empirically observed hand movements along the interception axis under different conditions of target arrival location and target speed-induced time pressure.

Perceptuomotor skill acquisition in a solo manual ball-and-beam task with varying accuracy requirements.

In the manual ball-and-beam task, participants have to control a ball that is rolling continuously on a long and hand-held beam. Since the task can be performed individually, in a solo action setting, as well as collaboratively, in a (dyadic) joint action setting, it allows us to investigate how joint performances arise from individual performances, which we investigate in a series of interrelated studies. Here we focused on individual skill acquisition on the ball-and-beam task in the solo action setting, with the goal to characterize the behavioral dynamics that arise from learning to couple (ball motion) perception and (beam motion) action.

Can I catch this ball and do I know if I can? Characterizing the affordance of interceptability for oneself.

In this study, we aimed to characterize the affordance of interceptability for oneself using a manual lateral interception paradigm. We asked a two-fold research question: (1) What makes a virtual ball interceptable or not? (2) How reliably can individuals perceive this affordance for oneself? We hypothesized that a spatiotemporal boundary would determine the interceptability of a ball, and that individuals would be able to perceive this boundary and make accurate perceptual judgments regarding their own interceptability. To test our hypotheses, we administered a manual lateral interception task to 15 subjects.

Cultural attraction in pottery practice: Group-specific shape transformations by potters from three communities.

Pottery is a quintessential indicator of human cultural dynamics. Cultural alignment of behavioral repertoires and artifacts has been considered to rest upon two distinct dynamics: selective transmission of information and culture-specific biased transformation. In a cross-cultural field experiment, we tested whether community-specific morphological features of ceramic vessels would arise when the same unfamiliar shapes were reproduced by professional potters from three different communities who threw vessels using wheels.