Aging and tennis playing in a coincidence-timing task with an accelerating object: the role of visuomotor delay

The purpose of the present study was to determine whether playing a specific ball sport, such as tennis, could maintain the coincidence-timing (CT) performance of older adults at a similar level to that of younger ones. To address this question, tennis players and nonplayers of three different age ranges (ages 20-30, 60-70, and 70-80 years) performed a simple CT task consisting of timing their response (pressing a button) to coincide with the arrival of a stimulus at a target. The stimulus moved at either an accelerating, constant, or decelerating velocity. As expected, all participants were affected by the velocity manipulation, which led to late and early responses to accelerating and decelerating stimuli, respectively. Whereas this response bias was increasingly pronounced with advancing age in nonplayers, no difference was found among player groups of different ages. Finally, we showed that the length of the visuomotor delay could explain the effect of nonconstant velocities.