Bayes on the court: Evidence for continuous prior-knowledge integration in virtual tennis returns

Abstract

Recent decades of research suggest that humans integrate current sensory information and prior expectations in a Bayesian way to guide behaviour. However, while Bayesian integration provides a powerful framework for perception, cognition and motor control, evidence is largely limited to simple lab tasks so far (Beck et al., 2023). Here we provide evidence for core Bayesian predictions in a complex sensorimotor task at the limit of human performance: returning tennis serves at a speed of 180 km/h or even 260 km/h.