Whose Side Are You On? Observing the Influence of Perceptual and Motor Experience on Soccer Passes

Successful athletes become highly skilled at encoding body movements to predict sport-specific projectile trajectories. Such predictive ability appears to be related to sidedness, arguably exacerbated by the likelihood of interacting with right- versus left-sided kinematic information. Notably, asymmetries in such perceptual biases have not been examined from a temporal perspective, which is critical due to the spatiotemporal nature of many sport skills. We hypothesized that implementing a sport-specific motor task would reveal reduced rightward bias in left-footed soccer players compared to previous studies, as perceptual and motor experience would influence predictive ability. Experienced left- and right-footed soccer players (n = 28) completed a pass-return task, wherein they watched videoed passers (left- or right-footed) kicking a ball toward them at 3 different speeds. Participants passed a soccer ball to one of three possible targets; they were asked to be as accurate as possible regarding the temporal onset and the endpoint spatial accuracy of their kick. Videos of the passer were occluded at ball contact to emphasize the encoding of kicking kinematics. A 3-factor ANOVA first revealed overall shorter response times when watching right- versus left-footed passers F(1, 26) = 13.60, p = .001, ${\eta }_p^2$ = .34. Yet, right-footed participants exhibited more asymmetric timing between the passer's footedness at slow versus fast speeds (p < .001). Such findings suggest that temporal projectile prediction ability in experienced soccer players is driven by perceptual familiarity as well as motor experience.