ABSTRACT
Catching skills are an essential part of many diverse sports. For instance, baseball, football, rugby, basketball, and team handball all involve the interception of a ball. In all these circumstances, players demonstrate highly skilled co-ordinated behaviour. To reach such high levels of performance and flexibility often takes years of development, learning and practice. An important characteristic of skilled performance is precise tuning of the action to the continuously changing circumstances of the environment. Perception is indispensable in this respect, because successful catching demands conformity to highly constrained spatial and timing requirements. In order to make a successful catch, the catcher not only has to time her/his catch accurately but she/he also has to orient and locate the hand at a precise location at a precise time. In addition, the catcher needs to anticipate the exact moment the ball will hit the hand in order to close the fingers around the ball. A classic high-speed film analysis of Alderson, Scully and Scully (1974) in the early 1970s of the last century showed that when the ball approaches with a velocity of 10 m/s, the catcher has only a time-window of 60 ms in order to avoid timing errors in grasping. In most sport situations the approach velocity of the ball reaches a higher value, e.g. 160-190 km/hour a for tennis serve, 80-90 km/ hour for a cricket ball (Land and McLeod, 2000) and 140–160 km/hour for baseball pitch (Bahill and LaRitz, 1984).
