ABSTRACT
A physical model of ball bouncing, simulated a task that consists of the repeated bouncing of a ball on a planar surface, demonstrating the existence of a stable attractor when the racket impacts the ball with negative acceleration. In the present experiment, the researchers test the human ability to perform adaptive actions in bouncing under circumstances where perceptual synchrony has been artificially changed. The introduction of a new synchrony between the kinesthetic information and the visual consequences of bouncing had another consequence: the sensory-motor attractors discovered by Schaal et al. (1996) were shifted. Subjects stood in front of a large screen and held a (real) table tennis racket whose position was recorded by an electromagnetic tracker. A virtual reality set-up (in which real and virtual rackets were desynchron-ized) is used in order to create new attractors.
