Interception of virtual throws reveals predictive skills based on the visual processing of throwing kinematics

Antonella Maselli; Paolo De Pasquale; Francesco Lacquaniti; Andrea d'Avella

doi:10.1016/j.isci.2022.105212

Interception of virtual throws reveals predictive skills based on the visual processing of throwing kinematics

iScience. 2022 Sep 24;25(10):105212. doi: 10.1016/j.isci.2022.105212. eCollection 2022 Oct 21.

Authors

Antonella Maselli^{1

2}, Paolo De Pasquale^{1

3}, Francesco Lacquaniti^{1

4}, Andrea d'Avella^{1

3}

Affiliations

¹ Laboratory of Neuromotor Physiology, Santa Lucia Foundation, 00142 Rome, Italy.
² Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technology, National Research Council (CNR), 00185 Rome, Italy.
³ Department of Biomedical and Dental Sciences and Morphofunctional Imaging, University of Messina, 98122 Messina, Italy.
⁴ Department of Systems Medicine and Center of Space Biomedicine, University of Rome Tor Vergata, 00133 Rome, Italy.

Abstract

Predicting the outcome of observed actions is fundamental for efficient interpersonal interactions. This is evident in interceptive sports, where predicting the future ball trajectory could make apart success and fail. We quantitatively assessed the predictive abilities of non-trained adults intercepting thrown balls in immersive virtual reality. Participants performed better when they could see the complete throwing action in addition to the ball flight, and they were able to move toward the correct direction when the ball flight was occluded. In both cases, performance varies with the individual motor style of the thrower. These results prove that humans can effectively predict the unfolding of complex full-body actions, with no need to extensively practice them, and that such predictions are exploited online to optimize interactive motor performance. This suggests that humans hold a functional knowledge of how actions recurrent in the human motor repertoire map into the changes brought to the environment.

Keywords: Biological sciences; behavioral neuroscience; neuroscience.