How do bicyclists intercept moving gaps in a virtual environment?

Abstract

Coordinating one's actions with the movements of other objects in the environments is important for both interception and avoidance tasks. Recent experiments show that performance in some interception tasks is well explained by a motion control strategy based on adjusting speed to maintain a constant bearing angle (CBA) between an individual's direction of motion and the object to be intercepted [Lenoir et al. 2002]. When the object and observer travel on intersecting, linear trajectories and the object travels with constant speed, then an observer employing the CBA strategy will move with constant speed.