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For successful basketball shooting, players must use information about the location of the basket relative to themselves. In this study, the authors examined to what extent shooting performance depends on the absolute distance to the basket (m) and the angle of elevation (alpha). In Experiment 1, expert players took jump shots under different visual conditions (light, one dot glowing on the rim in the dark, and dark). Task performance was satisfactory under the one-dot condition, suggesting that m and alpha provided sufficient information during movement execution. In Experiment 2, expert wheelchair basketball players performed shots binocularly and monocularly, under one-dot and light conditions. Performance under the one-dot condition was similar binocularly and monocularly, suggesting that distance information was not crucial for the online control of shooting. In Experiment 3, experts took jump shots under light, one-dot, and dark conditions while the basket's height was varied between trials unbeknownst to the participants. Players relied on alpha in combination with the official basket's height to guide their shooting actions. In conclusion, basketball shooting appears to be based predominantly on angle of elevation information., ((c) 2009 APA, all rights reserved.)

An experiment was conducted to examine whether basketball jump shooting relies on online visual (i.e., dorsal stream-mediated) control rather than motor preprogramming. Seventeen expert basketball players (eight males and nine females) performed jump shots under normal vision and in three conditions in which movement initiation was delayed by zero, one, or two seconds relative to viewing the basket. Shots were evaluated in terms of both outcome and execution measures. Even though most shots still landed near the basket in the absence of vision, end-point accuracy was significantly better under normal visual conditions than under the delay conditions, where players tended to undershoot the basket. In addition, an overall decrease of inter-joint coordination strength and stability was found as a function of visual condition. Although these results do not exclude a role of motor preprogramming, they demonstrate that visual sensory information plays an important role in the continuous guidance of the basketball jump shot.

In this study we examined the timing of optical information pick-up in basketball jump shooting using an intermittent viewing technique. We expected shooters to prefer to look at the basket as late as possible under the shooting style used. Seven experts with a high shooting style and five experts with a low shooting style took 50 jump shots while wearing liquid-crystal glasses that opened and closed at pre-set intervals. In principle, under this constraint, the participants could control when they saw the basket by actively modulating the timing of their movements. Analyses of the phasing of the movements relative to the events defined on the glasses revealed that low-style shooters preferred to see the basket just before the ball passed their line of sight, whereas high-style shooters tended to view the basket from underneath the ball after it passed their line of sight. Thus, most shooters preferred to pick up optical information as late as possible given the adopted shooting style. We conclude that, in dynamic far aiming tasks such as basketball jump shooting, late pick-up of optical information is critical for the successful guidance of movements.