Multisensory integration in anticipation: moderating effects of time and task constraints

ABSTRACT

Research on anticipation in sports has generally focused on the role of visual information. Only recently, effects of other modalities, such as auditory information have been considered. For instance, several studies highlight the importance of auditory information from racket-ball contact sounds and grunting in tennis on the anticipation of ball trajectories (Cañal-Bruland et al., 2018; Müller et al., 2019), with louder sounds yielding longer anticipated trajectories. However, findings were usually obtained in laboratory settings, without the time constraints characteristic of tennis matches. Therefore, two experiments tested whether these findings generalise to more ecologically valid settings. Participants responded to a series of video clips of tennis rallies (occluded after racket-ball contact) shown on a tablet with sound intensity of players’ grunting experimentally manipulated (muted, low, original, high) within participants. To introduce time constraints, Experiment 1 required them to react by moving their finger to the ball’s anticipated landing location just in time with the ball’s touchdown. In contrast to previous findings, grunt intensity neither affected the ball’s anticipated landing position nor the movement trajectory. Experiment 2 mirrored Experiment 1, except that participants responded without time pressure by pointing at the ball’s estimated landing position. Here results replicated the well-established findings of previous studies (e.g., Müller et al., 2019; louder grunts yielding longer anticipated trajectories), ruling out that the lack of effects in Experiment 1 was caused by specifics of the employed stimuli. The appropriateness of the employed temporal constraints in light of ecological validity and implications for future research are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Anticipation
• tennis
• grunting
• multisensory integration
• ecological validity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author, F. M., upon reasonable request.

Notes

1 The blocking account was ruled out because video stimuli featured grunts that occurred after racket ball contact sounds.

2 Note that Loffing (2017) included serves in his data, that were absent from our stimulus set. This may contribute to the lower estimate reported in Loffing (2017).

3 We thank an anonymous reviewer for drawing our attention to this possible moderating role of expertise.