Timing an attacking forehand drive in table tennis.

Comparison of initial and terminal temporal accuracy of 5 male top table tennis players performing attacking forehand drives led to the conclusion that because of a higher temporal accuracy at the moment of ball/bat contact than at initiation the players did not fully rely on a consistent movement production strategy. Functional trial-to-trial variation was evidenced by negative correlations between the perceptually specified time-to-contact at the moment of initiation and the mean acceleration during the drive; within-trial adaptation was also evident for two of the Ss. It is argued that task constraints provide the organizing principles for perception and action at the same time, thereby establishing a mutual dependency between the two. Allowing for changes in these parameters over time, a unified explanation is suggested that does not take recourse to large amounts of (tacit) knowledge on the part of the S. Expert performers in ball games, such as baseball (Hubbard Seng, 1954), table tennis (Bootsma Van Wieringen, 1988; Tyldesley Whiting, 1975), and field hockey (Franks, Weicker, Robertson, 1985), have been shown to execute their drives with remarkably consistent movement times, that