Timing an attacking forehand drive in table tennis.

Abstract

Comparison of initial and terminal temporal accuracy of 5 male top table tennis players performing attacking forehand drives led to the conclusion that because of a higher temporal accuracy at the moment of ball/bat contact than at initiation the players did not fully rely on a consistent movement production strategy. Functional trial-to-trial variation was evidenced by negative correlations between the perceptually specified time-to-contact at the moment of initiation and the mean acceleration during the drive; within-trial adaptation was also evident for two of the Ss. It is argued that task constraints provide the organizing principles for perception and action at the same time, thereby establishing a mutual dependency between the two. Allowing for changes in these parameters over time, a unified explanation is suggested that does not take recourse to large amounts of (tacit) knowledge on the part of the S. Expert performers in ball games, such as baseball (Hubbard & Seng, 1954), table tennis (Bootsma & Van Wieringen, 1988; Tyldesley & Whiting, 1975), and field hockey (Franks, Weicker, & Robertson, 1985), have been shown to execute their drives with remarkably consistent movement times, that