Perceiving opponent's action in ball sports: The contribution of early auditory and visual information

In recent years, there is a growing interest towards the role of auditory information in sport. Research revealed that, on the one side, the sounds deriving from sport movements provide important information concerning the movements themselves; on the other side, it has been highlighted that when these sounds are used appropriately, they can promote significant improvements in different performances. Various studies also revealed that, in some cases, auditory information is even more relevant than the respective visual information, thus challenging the traditional superiority of the visual domain in sport. The present thesis aims to contribute to this rapidly expanding body of research, by investigating some aspects that have not been studied yet. In particular, the focus is on the sounds produced by the others. Indeed, in order to perform effectively, it is not sufficient for an athlete to focus only her/his own movements, but also on those of the other people competing together and against her/him, to react appropriately to them. Specifically, the aim of this thesis is to investigate the contribution of early auditory information in perceiving opponent’s actions in two ball sports – soccer and volleyball – and to compare this contribution with that of the respective early visual information. The thesis is structured in five chapters. In Chapter 1, an overview of the literature dealing with sound and movement is provided, ranging from laboratory experiments concerning simple, rhythmic gestures/movements to field experiments aiming at the improvement of athletes’ performances. Within this chapter, some theoretical considerations are also made, and potential frameworks are mentioned. In Chapter 2, a series of four simple reaction time experiments is described. The aim of this preliminary set of experiments was to investigate whether the well-established phenomena observed in response to pure tones could be replicated with ecological sounds; in particular, foot-ball impacts of soccer penalty kicks were used as stimuli. In Chapter 3, two experiments whose aim was to investigate the contribution of early auditory and visual information to the discrimination of shot power are described; in particular, the first of these two experiments is focused on soccer penalty kicks, while the second one is focused on volleyball smashes. Both experiments were based on a two-alternative forced choice paradigm: pairs of stimuli were presented in a rapid sequence, and participants’ task was to discriminate whether the shot in the second stimulus was more or less powerful than the one in the first stimulus. In Chapter 4, three experiments whose aim was to investigate the contribution of early auditory and visual information in anticipating volleyball serves are described. In all the three experiments, participants were asked to predict the landing zone of the serves on the basis of their length. What differentiated the experiments among them were the stimuli and the number of possible answers: in the first experiment, auditory and visual information were either congruent or incongruent between them, and there were two possible answers; in the second experiment there were always two possible answers, but participants could rely only on one of the two sources of information at a time; in the last experiment, participants could rely only on one of the two sources of information at a time, and there were three possible answers. Finally, in Chapter 5, a general discussion touching all the various issues mentioned in the thesis is provided. Moreover, potential directions for future experiments within this field of research are suggested, and some implications considering the applied point of view are also discussed.