Skilled sports performance demands technical and perceptual-cognitive expertise. A true understanding of any one skill requires an examination of both factors. This thesis aimed to determine the biomechanical and perceptual-motor underpinnings of the Australian football handball through the use of performance analysis, biomechanics and motor learning. A novel performance analysis system assesse...

Rules Versus Reflexlike Productions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 457 Neural Substrates . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 458 Explicit Versus Implicit Knowledge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 459 Individual Differences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ....

Predicting the behavior of objects in the environment is an important requirement to overcome latencies in the sensorimotor system and realize precise actions in rapid situations. Internal forward models that were acquired during motor training might not only be used for efficiently controlling fast motor behavior but also to facilitate extrapolation performance in purely perceptual tasks. In t...

Multistable visual perception refers to phenomena, in which one invariant stimulus pattern is perceived in at least two different, mutually exclusive ways. In this EEG study we differentiate between perceptual- and motor-related processes during perceptual reversals. Delta- and alpha-band activity was analyzed while participants answered to a perceptual reversal either immediately or with a del...

Motor learning is dependent upon plasticity in motor areas of the brain, but does it occur in isolation, or does it also result in changes to sensory systems? We examined changes to somatosensory function that occur in conjunction with motor learning. We found that even after periods of training as brief as 10 min, sensed limb position was altered and the perceptual change persisted for 24 h. T...

Our aim was to clarify the mechanism by which perceptual learning improves motor skills of hands. We included 18 healthy volunteers (age 21.3 ± 0.3 years, mean ± standard deviation) in the study with a crossover design. The subjects were randomly classified into 3 groups, and they performed a 2-ball quick rotation task with a hand. The role of perceptual learning in improving the ability to dis...

The neural basis of mental imagery has been investigated by localizing the underlying neural networks, mostly in motor and perceptual systems, separately. However, how modality-specific representations are top-down induced and how the action and perception systems interact in the context of mental imagery is not well understood. Imagined speech production ("articulation imagery"), which induces...

Two experiments are reported that were designed to measure the accuracy and reliability of both visually guided hand movements (Exp. 1) and perceptual matching judgments (Exp. 2). The specific procedure for informing subjects of the required response on each trial was manipulated so that some tasks could only be performed using an allocentric representation of the visual target; others could be...

Among Esther Thelen's most important contributions to developmental theory is that there is no single factor that has priority in driving development. In this paper, we discuss how this notion influenced our research on perceptual-motor development. We show that multiple factors constrain perceptual-motor development, but that a relatively minor change in one of them may lead to significant cha...

The sonification of human movement data is a new approach to support motor perception, motor control and learning in sports and rehabilitation. Perceptual and motor control mechanisms both benefit of additional acoustic information, both are performing more accurate compared to unimodal conditions. But how does movement sonification work when supporting perception and action especially when pro...