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Precise timing when hitting falling balls
People are extremely good at hitting falling balls with a baseball bat. Despite the ball's constant acceleration, they have been reported to time hits with a standard deviation of only about 7 ms. To examine how people achieve such precision, we compared performance when there were no added res...
Autores principales: | , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Frontiers Media S.A.
2014
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4033095/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24904380 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2014.00342 |
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author | Brenner, Eli Driesen, Ben Smeets, Jeroen B. J. |
author_facet | Brenner, Eli Driesen, Ben Smeets, Jeroen B. J. |
author_sort | Brenner, Eli |
collection | PubMed |
description | People are extremely good at hitting falling balls with a baseball bat. Despite the ball's constant acceleration, they have been reported to time hits with a standard deviation of only about 7 ms. To examine how people achieve such precision, we compared performance when there were no added restrictions, with performance when looking with one eye, when vision was blurred, and when various parts of the ball's trajectory were hidden from view. We also examined how the size of the ball and varying the height from which it was dropped influenced temporal precision. Temporal precision did not become worse when vision was blurred, when the ball was smaller, or when balls falling from different heights were randomly interleaved. The disadvantage of closing one eye did not exceed expectations from removing one of two independent estimates. Precision was higher for slower balls, but only if the ball being slower meant that one saw it longer before the hit. It was particularly important to see the ball while swinging the bat. Together, these findings suggest that people time their hits so precisely by using the changing elevation throughout the swing to adjust the bat's movement to that of the ball. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-4033095 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2014 |
publisher | Frontiers Media S.A. |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-40330952014-06-05 Precise timing when hitting falling balls Brenner, Eli Driesen, Ben Smeets, Jeroen B. J. Front Hum Neurosci Neuroscience People are extremely good at hitting falling balls with a baseball bat. Despite the ball's constant acceleration, they have been reported to time hits with a standard deviation of only about 7 ms. To examine how people achieve such precision, we compared performance when there were no added restrictions, with performance when looking with one eye, when vision was blurred, and when various parts of the ball's trajectory were hidden from view. We also examined how the size of the ball and varying the height from which it was dropped influenced temporal precision. Temporal precision did not become worse when vision was blurred, when the ball was smaller, or when balls falling from different heights were randomly interleaved. The disadvantage of closing one eye did not exceed expectations from removing one of two independent estimates. Precision was higher for slower balls, but only if the ball being slower meant that one saw it longer before the hit. It was particularly important to see the ball while swinging the bat. Together, these findings suggest that people time their hits so precisely by using the changing elevation throughout the swing to adjust the bat's movement to that of the ball. Frontiers Media S.A. 2014-05-22 /pmc/articles/PMC4033095/ /pubmed/24904380 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2014.00342 Text en Copyright © 2014 Brenner, Driesen and Smeets. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms. |
spellingShingle | Neuroscience Brenner, Eli Driesen, Ben Smeets, Jeroen B. J. Precise timing when hitting falling balls |
title | Precise timing when hitting falling balls |
title_full | Precise timing when hitting falling balls |
title_fullStr | Precise timing when hitting falling balls |
title_full_unstemmed | Precise timing when hitting falling balls |
title_short | Precise timing when hitting falling balls |
title_sort | precise timing when hitting falling balls |
topic | Neuroscience |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4033095/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24904380 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2014.00342 |
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