ABSTRACT
Dexterity in interceptive actions is a necessary factor for achieving success in many sports; think of soccer and handball goalkeeping, returning balls in tennis, badminton and squash, or baseball and cricket batting. Here, excelling requires sport players to coordinate their action with the oncoming ball with an extraordinary degree of accuracy; only then are they able to intercept the ball at the right place and time. Perhaps remarkably, most research efforts have been directed at anticipating the outcomes of future events based upon information generated by an opponent’s action before the ball gets underway (see Abernethy et al., 2012) (see also Chapter 4). That is, researchers have presumed that waiting for information that arises from ball flight leaves insufficient time to execute the return action, even though ball flight provides the most reliable and accurate information for interception. Accordingly, many researchers have shown that expert sport players have superior anticipatory skills; that is, they are capable of using the comparatively less reliable and accurate information that arises prior to ball flight.
