Speaker: Dr. Yin-Hua Chen (陳尹華)
Research Center for Mind, Brain and Learning
National Chengchi University, Taiwan

Title: Seeing or Doing? Pitch recognition of batters versus pitchers: A preliminary report

Time: 2014/11/25 (Tuesday) 14:00-16:00
Venue: R101 Science Building 5, NCU (中央大學科五館 101 教室)

Abstract:
In understanding the observed movement, is the motor experience in doing the observed movement more important than the perceptual-motor experience in reacting to the observed movement? We tackled this question by asking advanced pitchers and advanced batters to identify the type of pitch (strike or ball) when they could see only fraction of pitching movement and the baseball trajectory. Their performance (correct, incorrect, and uncertain rate) was compared with pitchers and batters with intermediate level using 3 separate repeated-measures mixed-model 3 way (4 groups x 2 types of pitch x 12 lengths of pitching sequence) ANOVAs. We found that advanced batters tent to be more accurate and less uncertain than intermediate players, particularly when they could see very limited baseball trajectories. This could be attributed to their more experience in observing and reacting to the pitching movement. Interestingly, advanced batters seemed to recognize the balls as strikes. It could be because the final positions where some balls passed through the strike zone were very close to it. Therefore, we took this result as advanced batters’ batting strategy, rather than incorrect pitch recognition. In sum, our results supported the notion that in understanding an observed movement, the perceptuo-motor experience reacting to it is more important than the actual motor experience of the observed movement.