ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview on the perception of complex movements by using theories from psychology, examples from sports and specifically gymnastics. In sports involving complex movements such as gymnastics, perception plays a major role for athletes, coaches and judges. For instance, goalkeepers in soccer usually do not have enough time to initiate their movements in time to catch the ball, after reacting to the predicted flight direction of the ball. Especially the look-ahead gaze strategies were observed, showing the use of anticipatory cues to guide movements. In most everyday actions, people use their visual perception to guide their movements. Visual perception is the “process of picking up environmental information, which instils form within a perceiver". Depending on the perceiver and his or her role in the sport, visual perception serves different functions. Visual perception is used to attend to the most relevant cues to judge movement quality.
