Is spatial judgement of ball trajectories a highly differentiated or hierarchically organized skill?
An experiment was designed to examine the structure of spatial judgement skill related to ball trajectories. 54 subjects (16 to 23 years old) were administered prediction tasks in two highly contrasted planes (saggital vs fronto-parallel) and a speed of visual-discrimination task. Factor analysis shows that the skill is hierarchically organized with a broad-spectrum factor which covers the whole range of perceptual conditions and two group factors, one per trajectory plane. The low magnitude of the partial correlations between Inspection Time and Prediction Tasks (with simple reaction time kept constant) was interpreted as a confirmation of the hierarchical nature of the skill.
