Motor competence is not enough: Handedness does not facilitate visual anticipation of same-handed action outcome

Hemifield-Specific Rotational Biases during the Observation of Ambiguous Human Silhouettes

“…These results indicate an attentional/perceptual bias toward the right side of the human body and are also consistent with findings from research investigating the perception of sport actions, according to which the outcomes of right-limbed movements can be anticipated better than the outcomes of leftlimbed movements [7][8][9][10][11][12][13]. Noteworthy, this difference is present regardless of observers' handedness [7,11], which is in contrast with the proposal that the correspondence between observed movements and stored representations could foster action recognition (see [14] for a review). According to Hagemann [7] and Loffing, Schorer, et al [9] (see also [8,10,11,13]), the ability to discriminate left-handed actions would be lower than that to discriminate right-handed actions (the same would hold true for foot movements), a difference likely due to a perceptual frequency effect (see also [15]): given that both right-and left-handers usually play against right-rather than left-handed opponents, the discrimination of righthanded actions would be easier for both groups in several interactive sports, in agreement with theories that emphasize the crucial role of visual experience in action perception (e.g., [16]).…”

“…Similar findings were reported for dynamic stimuli representing ambiguous human bodies represented in the act of performing unimanual and unipedal movements [3,5,6]. These results indicate an attentional/perceptual bias toward the right side of the human body and are also consistent with findings from research investigating the perception of sport actions, according to which the outcomes of right-limbed movements can be anticipated better than the outcomes of leftlimbed movements [7][8][9][10][11][12][13]. Noteworthy, this difference is present regardless of observers' handedness [7,11], which is in contrast with the proposal that the correspondence between observed movements and stored representations could foster action recognition (see [14] for a review).…”

“…Noteworthy, this difference is present regardless of observers' handedness [7,11], which is in contrast with the proposal that the correspondence between observed movements and stored representations could foster action recognition (see [14] for a review). According to Hagemann [7] and Loffing, Schorer, et al [9] (see also [8,10,11,13]), the ability to discriminate left-handed actions would be lower than that to discriminate right-handed actions (the same would hold true for foot movements), a difference likely due to a perceptual frequency effect (see also [15]): given that both right-and left-handers usually play against right-rather than left-handed opponents, the discrimination of righthanded actions would be easier for both groups in several interactive sports, in agreement with theories that emphasize the crucial role of visual experience in action perception (e.g., [16]). From an evolutionary point of view, an attentional and perceptual bias in favor of right-handed movements might be adaptive in social life because most everyday social interactions occur with right-rather than left-handed individuals (see also [17] for a more detailed discussion).…”

“…In order to legitimate our decision, we would like to point out that observers can report more easily the perceived spinning direction rather than the perceived laterality of ambiguous stimuli like those adopted here, and nonetheless-as also found in the present study-a population bias is observed as regards perceived limb laterality but not perceived spinning direction [3,5,6]. Therefore, it is plausible that-at least on an implicit level-the perceived spinning direction of the silhouette unveils its perceived limb laterality, an idea that would be strongly corroborated if a positive correlation were found between the perceptual bias for the right limb observed in studies with ambiguous human silhouettes [1][2][3][4][5][6] and the perceptual advantage for right-limbed movements observed in sport studies [7][8][9][10][11][12][13]. Second, we discarded trials in which participants moved their gaze from the fixation point through a visual inspection of the video recordings of their face, acquired during the experiment, rather than by using an eye-tracking device, which might reduce the precision of our exclusion procedure.…”

Individual Differences and Transfer of Visual Anticipation in Expert Female Field Hockey Goalkeepers

“…This indicates that skilled players have difficulty in the pick-up of left-compared with right-handed opponent kinematics to anticipate, and novices have difficulty across both opponents. Similar findings have been reported in skilled European handball goalkeepers 16 and field players, 19 as well as expert and emerging-expert baseball batters. 17 Only one study, to our knowledge, has investigated the pick-up of both contextual (e.g., opponent on-court positioning) and kinematic information from different opponents to anticipate.…”