ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of the literature from the perspective of the ecological approach. 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. Excelling requires sport players to coordinate their action with the oncoming ball with an extraordinary degree of accuracy. The chapter discusses the evidence that learning and expertise in movement control of interceptive actions indeed encompasses changes in the information that players attend to and/or changes in the way the information affects movement. The identification of specifying optic variables in sporting tasks is not a trivial issue. The chapter discusses the work of Jacobs and Michaels, who used catching to demonstrate that “the sophistication of expert performance derives from the improved fit of experts to their environments”.
