Interception Kinematics in the Presence of a Visuomotor Delay

When a tennis player hits a ball with a racquet, her brain integrates multiple sensory inputs that are processed at variable delays with respect to the instance of the hit. It is unclear how the brain overcomes these delays to process simultaneous multisensory signals. To understand this, we studied the performance of participants who played a virtual pong game in which the movement of the paddle was either concurrent with hand movement or delayed. We found that, in contrast to the concurrent condition, participants compensate for the delayed feedback by altering the kinematics of the interception point and do not intercept the ball at paddle’s velocity peaks. They also exhibited hypermetric reach movements following delay exposure. We further examined whether this compensation is affected by conscious awareness of the delay. We exposed participants to either an abrupt perturbation of short (150 ms) or long (300 ms) delays, or to a gradually increasing delay (0-300 ms). We present and discuss an analysis of the effect of these delay conditions on the kinematics of the movements during ball hits and misses.