The predictive mind in motion: exploring visuomotor expertise through interception.

Abstract

This study examined the role of predictive processing mechanisms in naturalistic visuomotor skill learning. We investigated whether the acquisition of an interceptive skill was characterised by encoding and using learned probabilistic associations. Forty-five participants were randomly assigned to either an intervention or control group and practiced intercepting bouncing balls in virtual reality across two sessions. Only the intervention group received probabilistic visual cues - specifically, ball and room colours - that signalled likely bounce trajectories, offering an opportunity to learn and exploit these associations. We assessed task performance (interception rate, return accuracy), anticipatory gaze behaviour (predictive fixations and gaze tracking), and pupillary responses to unexpected outcomes. Participants in the training group demonstrated more predictive gaze strategies and physiological surprisal responses to probabilistically unlikely bounce outcomes post training. These findings suggest that encoding probabilistic environmental cues can contribute to effective visuomotor control. The results offer novel evidence for the role of top-down prediction and contextual modulation in visuomotor skills, with implications for training and expertise development in sport. More broadly, this work contributes to an alternate account of expertise as the capacity to encode and exploit environmental regularities through predictive mechanisms.