Cristian Muñoz-Puelman¹, Alexander Goettker^2,3, Cristina de la Malla; ¹Vision and Control of Action Group, Department of Cognition, Development, and Psychology of Education, Institute of Neurosciences, Universitat de Barcelona, Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain, ²Justus Liebig Universität Giessen, Germany, ³Center for Mind, Brain and Behavior, University of Marburg and Justus Liebig University, Marburg, Germany

Attractive serial dependence effects have been shown across various perceptual tasks, and for actions like eye and head movements. We know less about how these biases may influence performance in dynamic tasks such as interception, where accurate responses depend on real-time information about moving targets. To investigate this, we asked participants (N=14) to perform an interception task where each trial consisted of two sequentially presented targets. The first target, the prior, moved either leftwards or rightwards at a velocity of 5 or 15 cm/s. The second target, the probe, always moved at 10 cm/s, either in the same or in the opposite direction as the prior. To dissociate the role of active motor engagement with the prior from its purely perceptual influence on probe interception, participants completed two conditions: (1) intercepting both prior and probe targets, and (2) observing the priors and intercepting only the probes. Consistent with previous findings, probes tended to be intercepted further ahead following a fast prior and further behind following a slow prior. However, the magnitude of this effect varied significantly across conditions: When participants intercepted both targets, the prior's velocity influenced interception errors when the prior and probe moved in the same direction, but less so when they moved in opposite directions. In the observation condition, the effect had a similar magnitude regardless of whether the prior and probe moved in the same or opposite directions. These results suggest that repetitive movement execution could play a role in modulating the influence of prior target velocity and indicate potential differences in how velocity information is encoded and used in different cases: as a vector when intercepting all targets, and as a scalar when intercepting only the probes. Such flexibility in velocity processing may reflect adaptive strategies to balance perceptual and motor requirements in dynamic tasks.

Acknowledgements: Work supported by grants PID2023-150883NB-I00 and CNS2022-135808 funded by MICIU/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and by the European Union NextGenerationEU/PRTR to CM. CMP was supported by an ANID grant 72230035. AG was supported by the DFG; project number 222641018-SFB/TRR 135 Project A1.