The dynamics of human action and perception during the coordination of a ball interception task

This study aims to investigate how humans coordinate and perceive actions in a dynamic ball interception task. In this task, two individuals must continuously coordinate their actions to keep bouncing a table tennis ball towards the wall. We tracked the body and eye movements of individuals to analyze their coordination. From body and eye movement data, we extracted eye-movement and action features, such as anticipatory looks, ball pursuit duration, and kinematic energy of racket. To understand individuals’ movement patterns, the Lyapunov spectrum of their racket movement was analyzed. In addition, a combination of a Hidden Markov Model and action features was employed to identify the transition from stable to semi-stable coordination states. Our preliminary findings suggested that participants’ racket movements showed chaotic behavior in both short and long coordination sequences. This behavior may result from their attempts to compensate for their partner’s actions or their own errors. We also observed significant differences in eye and body movements when transitioning from stable to semi-stable coordination. In the semi-stable state, the duration of pursuit became shorter, and the movement of the racket became more irregular compared to the stable state. Overall, our study offers a quantitative framework for understanding the dynamics of human movement and perception during realistic interception tasks.