The effect of priming on interceptive actions

Time constraints in ball sports encourage players to take advantage of any relevant advance information available to prepare their actions. Advance information, therefore, can serve to prime movement parameters (e.g. movement direction) and reduce the amount of time required to prepare the upcoming movement. Regularly, however, players face situations in which the information used to prepare the action turns out to be outdated just prior to movement initiation and the prepared action needs to be changed as soon as possible. The aim of the experiment presented here was to determine whether the priming effect, generally reported for reaction time tasks, could be generalised to interceptive actions. A secondary aim was to examine the strategies employed by the participants to cope with valid, invalid, or no advance information. The results indicate that, when available, the participants used advance information to prepare their movements. More specifically, in comparison with valid advance information, hit rate and spatial accuracy were reduced when the participants had no advance information and were even smaller when the information conveyed was invalid. The results also suggest that in the absence of valid advance information, the strategies employed to intercept the moving target were tuned to the time remaining until the interception was due to occur.