RESEARCH ARTICLE Visual attention affects temporal estimation in anticipatory motor actions Welber Marinovic • Guy Wallis Received: 14 March 2011 / Accepted: 14 June 2011 / Published online: 23 June 2011 Ó Springer-Verlag 2011 Abstract The production of accurate motor actions requires successful extraction of relevant information about the target of that action. By the same token, it also requires the successful exclusion of potentially distracting, irrele- vant information. This study sought to determine the impact of transient visual distractions on performance in an anticipatory timing task, in particular the temporal and spatial relationship between distractor and target at which maximal distraction occurs. The results support the notion of a critical temporal and spatial window of distraction which provides insight into the visuomotor processes underlying distraction. Keywords Action Á Distractor Á Interception Á Motor preparation Á Time estimation Á Visual attention Introduction Interactions with moving objects are commonplace in our daily activities (e.g. driving a car, hitting a tennis ball). These interactions usually occur in the presence of a multitude of sensorial stimuli. Some sources of sensorial stimuli are important to accurately guide our actions towards moving objects, such as visual information about the motion of a ball while playing tennis or when nav- igating around an obstacle (Tresilian et al. 2004; Cloete and Wallis 2009). Other sources of sensorial information, on the other hand, may be irrelevant to our goals and perhaps can be completely ignored. The accurate inter- ception of a moving target depends on the preparation of elements of performance—such as amplitude and direc- tion (Marinovic et al. 2008, 2009b)—as well as the precise estimation of the time at which descending motor commands must be issued (Tresilian and Houseman 2005; Tresilian and Plooy 2006; Marinovic et al. 2009a, c; Tresilian et al. 2009; Marinovic et al. 2010; Zago et al. 2010; Marinovic et al. 2011). Previous research suggests that the presence of multiple moving objects in the scene can affect time-to-arrival estimation of a moving target (Todd 1981; Lyon and Waag 1995; DeLucia and Novak 1997; Oberfeld and Hecht 2008; Baures et al. 2010). This observation seems to hold even if the participants know in advance which moving objects are irrelevant to the task (Lyon and Waag 1995; Oberfeld and Hecht 2008; Baures et al. 2011). That multiple moving objects can be distracting when one does not know the difference between target and distractors is not surprising given our limited capacity for dual tasking (Borst et al. 2010). But that moving visual distractors can affect tem- poral estimation processes even when these are irrelevant to the task is an interesting observation with important practical applications (e.g. drivers’ safety). This inability to selectively ignore irrelevant moving visual stimuli has been demonstrated thus far with tasks where the final displace- ment of the moving target was occluded (Lyon and Waag 1995; Oberfeld and Hecht 2008). Thus, the participants were required to make a prediction about the motion of the object during its final approach at the arrival location. According to some researchers (Tresilian 1995; DeLucia W. Marinovic Á G. Wallis Perception & Motor Systems Laboratory, School of Human Movement Studies, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD, Australia W. Marinovic (&) Perception Lab, School of Psychology, The University of Queensland, Blair Drive, St Lucia, Brisbane, QLD 4072, Australia e-mail: w.marinovic@uq.edu.au 123 Exp Brain Res (2011) 212:613–621 DOI 10.1007/s00221-011-2772-2