ABSTRACT
As far back as the late 1960s, John Whiting (e.g. Whiting, 1968) instigated and became the principal leader of a line of experimental research aimed at studying the effects of critical viewing time intervals on one-handed ball catching. These studies (e.g. Whiting, Gill and Stephenson, 1970; Whiting, Alderson and Sanderson, 1973) were solidly anchored in the information-processing framework, and information was assumed to be processed discretely within ‘perceptual moments’ (Shallice, 1964), which had to be identified and quantified. Initial work led to a second research trend in which a special device was used to precisely control the portions of trajectory where the ball was visible (Whiting and Sharp, 1974, Sharp and Whiting, 1974, 1975; Sharp, 1975). The idea was to analyse performance in relation to (i) the joint effect of the visible and non-visible portions of ball flight trajectory (Whiting and Sharp, 1974), and (ii) the impact of critical time intervals and the so-called movement detector systems (i.e. image-retina and eye-head) (e.g. Sharp and Whiting, 1975). This work was essentially concerned with the amount of information required for successful catching performance, and the time required to process this information.
