When will the ball rebound? Evidence for the usefulness of mental analogues in appraising the duration of motions.
This study explores the way people appraise the duration of motions when these are only seen momentarily. Three possible theoretical accounts of this skill were developed. The first and second held an analogy between the duration of motions and their visuospatial representations. The third account was based on the existence of a pure chronometrical representation. Three copies of a tennis ball trajectory were created to reproduce the characteristics of the trajectory in terms of each account. The participants first memorized the copy and then used it to appraise the duration of the actual ball trajectory seen only momentarily at the beginning of its flight. The performance of a group given the visuospatial copy paralleled those of a referent group who were allowed to see the actual referent trajectory to memorize its duration. Results showed the importance of visuospatial analogous representations. However, a spatial representation seems to allow better memorization of motion duration.
Féry
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YA
Laboratoire des Sciences du Sport, Université René Descartes, France. fery@staps.univ-paris5.fr
Vom Hofe
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D000328:Adult; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008568:Memory; D009039:Motion Perception; D013028:Space Perception; D013998:Time Perception